


The Other

by omnishambles



Category: due South
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Enemies to Partners, Gay Panic, M/M, Post-Canon, friends to lovers???, partners to friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-13 14:55:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28530300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omnishambles/pseuds/omnishambles
Summary: Then it clicks: she means the other one. Ray Kowalski’s back.Ray Vecchio's trying to scrape his life together post-Vegas, and then Kowalski turns up - quiet, unsettled, with a badge that still has Vecchio's name on it and nowhere to go. Why not work together for a while? Both of them are down a partner, after all.A post-canon AU.
Relationships: Ray Kowalski/Ray Vecchio
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18





	The Other

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you [equestrianstatue](http://archiveofourown.org/users/equestrianstatue) for getting me into this fandom in the first place, for the detailed, patient beta, and for making me add another 5,000 words. What a ride.

‘Hey, look, it’s Ray!’

When he hears Frannie squealing, Ray looks up from his desk, confused. He’s been sat here minding his own business for, what, half an hour already? And then it clicks: she means the other one. Ray Kowalski’s back.

Everyone in the bullpen loves a distraction from work, so obviously they huddle round Kowalski like he’s prize pig at a fair, ‘What was it like up there, you get your man? I hear they always do,’ that kind of thing, like he’s a returning war hero and not somebody who’s been on a glorified holiday for two or three weeks. Where were all these people when Ray coughed up a bullet on Welsh’s couch? Bunch of fairweather suck-ups.

And maybe he wants to go over there himself and say: _Hey, you’re back, and you’re me, so how does that work?_ Or maybe he wants to ask, _what, no Mountie?_ But he’s not keen to get into all that in front of just about everyone he’s ever met, and anyway, he’s busy. There’s been a John Doe found in some Fuller Park alleyway, and Ray – unlike everyone else round here, apparently – is still a cop.

He’s cross-referencing the Doe’s description against missing persons, the kind of grunt-work Frannie should really be doing, but fine. A possible match comes up pretty fast: Mitch Fryer, college drop-out, 23. Missing a week, called in by a colleague from their coffee shop on East 51st. He’s the right height, right age and could be the guy, but it’s a bad photo, and calling his parents to get an ID is really not what Ray feels like doing today. They’re not so local, either – if he gets them to drive all the way from the other side of Fort Wayne and it’s a case of mistaken identity, it’ll be tough. Though of course, if he gets them to drive all the way and he’s right, it’ll be worse.

Anyway, he’s sitting there thinking how this is not Ray Vecchio’s day, when he feels hairs standing up on the back of his neck. Somebody’s watching him. It’s a feeling he’s grown to hate, because if you’re being watched when you don’t want to be, maybe somebody’s thinking, Hey, you know what, I don’t remember Langoustini’s nose looking _quite_ like that.

Ray turns around. Kowalski’s skulking – that’s the only word for it – against the wall two feet from his desk, trying to look occupied in whatever file he’s just picked up. Clearly the coffee party’s broken up and everyone’s gone back to work, because they’re what passes for alone in the chaos of the bullpen. They haven’t seen each other since Ray got a bullet in the lung, boom, bang, and before he knew it Fraser was gone, chasing criminals up in the great white north, and Kowalski with him. And now Kowalski’s back, alone.

‘What, no Mountie?’

They look at each other. Kowalski chews his lip, something hard to read in his expression. He shakes his head.

‘No, I figured,’ says Ray, because he did, somehow. He could smell it when Fraser said goodbye to him at the hospital. He just _knew_.

It isn’t the best feeling in the world, admitting to this guy, this impostor, that his so-called best friend’s never been in touch to say he isn’t coming back. Ray feels kind of angry and kind of embarrassed. He turns back to his work, trying to focus on something else. But he can feel Kowalski’s eyes still boring into the back of his head, and he’s just standing there, and Ray can’t concentrate, until finally he turns back around and says, ‘ _What_?’ with too much force. Kowalski blinks.

‘I, uh,’ he says slowly. ‘I ain’t got a desk no more. Or what I mean is – you’re sitting at it. And it’s your desk, obviously I get that, finder’s keepers, or – what’s the phrase? I mean you were here first, obviously, so it’s fine, but I don’t have anywhere to sit.’

Ray sighs. ‘Talk to Welsh, why don’t you?’

‘Busy.’

‘Sure. Well, can’t you sit wherever Fraser was sitting? He’s not coming back, is he?’

Kowalski looks awkward. ‘Yeah,’ he says slowly. ‘Except Fraser never had a desk.’

‘Oh,’ says Ray, ‘right,’ and of course he is. Somehow, being away, coming back to find the Mountie just where he expected, Ray almost forgot that Fraser never really worked here. Of course he never had a proper desk, just a spare chair tucked into the corner of Ray’s. And now his cheeks are hot, like he’s said something crazy, which he kind of has, because - a desk for the Mountie, imagine. Then he realises there’s no official process for what comes next. His partner hasn’t transferred away. It’s more like he never had a partner to begin with.

‘Well,’ he blusters. ‘You can sit in his old spot, if you want, til things get sorted.’ He nods at the other side of his desk. ‘I mean, your old job’s waiting for you, right? I didn’t even know if you’d come back here.’ Ray meant _here_ _to this precinct_ , but maybe Kowalski thinks he meant something else, because his face is full of something Ray doesn’t know how to read.

‘Yeah,’ Kowalski mutters. He’s still standing there, staring at the desk like there might be a secret message scratched into it somewhere. ‘Yeah, I didn’t really know where else to go.’

Ray’s focus is drifting back to Mitch Fryer’s parents, what he’s gonna say to them, whether there’s anybody else round here who might wanna make that call. Maybe Kowalski’s good at that stuff? Fraser must’ve got something out of working with him, after all. All that time. Anyway, he better get the wheels turning soon because it’ll take them, what, two hours to drive here and already it’s nearly lunchtime. Better to know before the end of the day if it’s this kid or not so he can do something about it.

Except Kowalski’s still stood around, saying nothing.

‘So?’ says Ray. Kowalski looks at him. ‘What you waiting for, a written invite?’

For a second he thinks the guy might kick off, explode, like throwing his files all over the place last time they were here, but then he just says, ‘Sure.’ He drags a chair over and sits down the other side of Ray’s desk. Ray thinks about how Fraser used to sit across from him there, straight-backed and waiting. _Well, Ray? Go on._

Ray blinks. Kowalski’s looking at him.

‘So,’ Kowalski says, still looking. He drags the back of a hand across his cheek and it catches on stubble. ‘So, what are we working on?’

 _We_ , Ray thinks. Who’s we?

  


+

Ray’s apartment is a nightmare. There are boxes in the hall, boxes where there ought to be a TV, he’s keeping his bedside lamp on top of more fucking boxes and somehow he can’t scrape together the energy to make this place feel like somewhere he actually lives instead of just a set of walls to sleep inside. After work he thinks: maybe today? Takes some of the boxes over to the couch with him. Then he sits back, turns the TV on and forgets about it.

Obviously it’s nice to have his own space again, somewhere he can relax, slob about, be totally unobserved, be himself – whatever that is – but equally, equally obviously, a penthouse it is _not_. Cop salaries don’t tend to buy the kind of luxury Armando enjoyed.

Not that he’s bought the place, of course; he’s still way too unsettled to make any big, permanent decisions. But a couple of nights back in his childhood bedroom were more than enough: he went out sharpish, let a place ten minutes’ drive from the precinct and filled it up with all the boxes of crap he’d put into storage before he left. The temporary-feeling bachelor pad, the piles of stuff he needs to sort through, it’s like being divorced all over again, except this time he’s divorced the Mafia.

Still, it’s fine. Good being here, temporary as it is, good to have the change in lifestyle to complain about. Because it’s easy, easier to talk about having lost Armando’s suits and nice apartment and good car than what he’s actually been up to for a year and a half. He kind of rehearsed it during all the long, sleepless nights where he lay there wondering what the hell he’d tell his mother if he ever made it home. Not that he was in _The Godfather_ or whatever, but all the same, they weren’t nice people, obviously.

Welsh says Ray’s got to talk to a psych about everything, do a proper debrief, which is pretty standard for these things, only, what do they want to hear? That Ray feels like a piece of crap, which he doesn’t, and he’s totally tormented, which he isn’t – or that he feels totally normal, never been better? Because that isn’t right either. It was lonely. It was weird. And now it’s weird to be back.

Ray did what he had to do, his job. He kept his hands and his conscience as clean as he could, tried wherever possible to keep the indiscriminate blood-spray of organised crime, the collateral damage, away from people who didn’t deserve it – he made a difference in a way he would have loved, back in the early days of the force. Before Fraser. Before his solve rate took a leap, back when he’d been desperate to feel he was really doing something. Hey, maybe that’s all it is – maybe it’s just that by the time his big break came around, he didn’t need it anymore.

Ray sighs, turns off the TV and opens one of the boxes. It’s a mish-mash inside, packed in a hurry. He remembers stuffing things in when he was getting ready to go. He’d had so little time, mothballing his whole life for who knew how long, Fraser all the way up in the frozen north on vacation. And now it’s all over, he’s back, and still no Mountie.

Honestly, it’s dumb, but Fraser’s the only person he wants to talk to. Kowalski said he was headed up to some new posting in the middle of nowhere, no number yet, Ray just has to wait for him to call, and it’s – annoying, kind of, though he doesn’t know why he should feel annoyed. He should be happy. He’s waiting for a phone call from _Fraser_ for God’s sake; time was, a couple of months ago, he’d have cut off a finger to feel that old feeling, hanging around, waiting to hear from a friend.

Not a finger, obviously. That’s absurd, absurdly dramatic. But then – some days, maybe. Ray was never used to being lonely before he went out there. Big family. And of course, for so long before he went, he’d had the Mountie. He never realised just how much _time_ they spent together, late evenings, lunches, holiday shopping, it had been kind of like being married, not in that way obviously, but in the sense that, if he was ever at a loose end, he’d known who to call. And then all of a sudden, he was on his own.

Obviously that had been the worst bit: not just being alone, but never seeing anyone who really knew you, the real you. Ray won’t ever tell anybody this, but sometimes, on the really bad days, he whispered his real name to himself in the shower – just to hear it, to feel the shape of it in his mouth. You never know how attached you are to your own damn name until you don’t hear it out loud for months and months and months. And that whole time, another guy was walking around up here called Ray Vecchio, like it meant absolutely nothing.

Ray pulls a childhood annual out of the box, cowboys on the front with dusty-kneed horses and Winchester rifles. Underneath that are a few other books and, packed in newspaper, a set of old espresso cups from before he was married. He has nowhere to put all this crap, but he doesn’t really want to get rid of it either. It feels dangerous to start jettisoning stuff when looking at it makes him feel the way it feels, which is: who did all of this belong to anyway? Ray Vecchio? Who the hell is that?

  


+

The problem with Chicago PD is that the wheels turn unbelievably slowly. Ray’s been back from Vegas since early March and it’s practically April and still nobody up top seems to have noticed – no debrief, not even a hint of Welsh’s famous psych appointments, like if he didn’t come back on their schedule then it didn’t happen at all. And now Kowalski’s here, hanging around like a lost dog.

When Ray goes in the next morning, Kowalski’s already at his desk – their desk, whatever, somebody’s desk – sat there with his jaw set, ready to have a fight about it. But Ray’s tired. ‘What’s top of the pile today?’ he says instead.

What’s top of the pile, it turns out, is a string of low-rent carjackings downtown. Ray’s still driving some piece of shit department car on a loan, so they take Kowalski’s. It’s beautiful. But seeing as it’s sort of his fault that Ray’s spent the last three weeks driving a Toyota, it’s hard to get too excited about it.

It’s not very exciting police work. But it only takes an hour or two for a snitch of Kowalski’s to link the whole thing back to some local gangland guy on the up-and-up. It’s useful, Kowalski’s knowledge, his contacts – all Ray’s own are a year and a half out of date. But when they pull up outside this guy’s apartment, Ray says, ‘Okay, Kowalski, how you doing? Pumped to go make an arrest?’

Kowalski says, ‘Uh, about that,’ and slides his badge across the dash. Ray picks it up.

 _Raymond Vecchio_ , it says, in black and white.

‘Jesus,’ says Ray. He feels a strange, uncomfortable feeling in the back of his neck, like he’s looking at his own ghost. He thinks of the holiday specials from when he was a kid, the guy wiping snow off his own gravestone, _I can change, I can change!_

Kowalski’s watching him pretty closely. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Chicago PD, huh?’

Ray passes the badge back. There’s nothing else to say, so he tries for something funny. ‘Keep it, it suits you,’ he jokes. For some reason Kowalski blushes right to the roots of his hair. ‘Okay, look, come on. Let’s go.’

The arrest’s easy, small-fry, and it’s not like you have to give the perp your name when you arrest them, let them tick you off a list. Ray kind of forgets the whole thing until he’s back in the office. It’s the paperwork that stumps him.

‘So do I say Kowalski in the report or what?’

‘Uh,’ says Kowalski. He looks up at Welsh, standing behind his desk, who shrugs expansively.

‘Good luck,’ says Welsh.

Ray looks at it for a while and in the end decides to put _Detective Vecchio and I_. It’s not technically incorrect and Kowalski can sign it later, when everything’s cleared up. But looking at the words in black and write, in his own handwriting, makes him feel insane. He crosses everything out, puts the file back in his in-tray and decides to let the paperwork wait.

‘You want a ride home?’ Kowalski offers. Ray looks up. When did it get so late? Where’s the day gone?

‘Uh,’ he says slowly. ‘Sure. Thanks.’

Ray grabs his jacket, his keys. Something’s made him feel not-quite-right all day, like stroking a dog backwards. He shakes his head. ‘You okay?’ Kowalski asks.

‘Sure,’ says Ray, and they head out together to the car.

Desk Sergeant Morton stops them at the door. ‘So you two are working together now?’ he says.

They look at each other and shrug.

Morton chuckles. ‘Okay, so which one of you’s the Mountie?’

Kowalski likes that one, it makes him laugh. ‘I’ll do it,’ he says. ‘I’d look better in the uniform, no offence.’

‘No, sure,’ Ray says lightly, and he’s laughing too. ‘You’d be anyone but Stanley Kowalski, huh?’

Did he mean to stick the knife in? He’s not sure. But if he thought it would make him feel good, watching the laugh die on Kowalski’s face like that, he was wrong. It makes him feel like a piece of shit.

  


+

Elias Stern, the drug dealer who – they’re pretty sure – dumped Mitch Fryer’s body in an alleyway, is turning thirty. He’s hired the back of some downtown club for a big party and filled it with vodka and strippers, and now they’re gonna ruin the whole thing by arresting him.

Ray can’t wait. It’s the first thing he’s done since getting out of hospital, since longer than that, that’s really put a spring in his step. Finally, something real, something that matters: he’s gonna get Stern in custody and get him to trial and then Mitch Fryer’s parents get to watch him go down for murder one. It won’t bring their kid back. But it’ll be something.

They’ve got a statement from a great witness at Fryer’s work, it turned out he talked a lot over the coffee cups, she kept a diary, the jury’s gonna love her; they know Fryer tried to sell her coke, that he was getting in too deep with Stern, couldn’t make ends meet on the service job. Meanwhile, a snitch of Kowalski’s told them all about Stern – jealous, violent, hell of a temper – and his girlfriend too, how she took a liking to Fryer, got him to take her out once or twice. It’s a case, or the start of one. Either way, they want Stern off the streets ASAP.

The two of them are outside waiting in the GTO, where they’ll be until 23:00. Ray’s reckons by that time, Stern will be three sheets to the wind and have his guard down, and in the meantime he and Kowalski are here to keep an eye on the exit and wait.

They’ve been working together a week or two, and stakeouts invite confidences – the late night quiet, nothing to do but kill time – but all Ray can think of tonight are questions he doesn’t want to ask. About Fraser, about what happened while he was away.

He keeps his mouth shut, and so does Kowalski. So for hours they sit there, watching the nightclub queue and listening to the radio.

22:00, 22:36, 22:58.

‘Okay,’ Ray says. ‘I think he’s ready for us.’

Neither of them move. Ray can feel Kowalski watching him, and then his voice, quiet, thick with disuse, is between them in the car.

‘You sure this is the right play, Vecchio?’

Ray looks back at him. He thinks about Mitch Fryer’s body, left behind a dumpster like a piece of trash, and the kid’s parents; simple, quiet, good people who he had to watch ID their only kid. They didn’t even cry. Too shocked. It goes that way sometimes. And he thinks about all the times he had to save face, think of the bigger play, give an order for somebody to be left somewhere like that, like dirt, like nothing, and even if they were bad people, that didn’t mean that somewhere out there, there wasn’t a mother who loved them, who had to find out that that was how the body she loved had been found, the body she’d fed and nursed and cleaned and watched grow, left lying in some dirty alleyway like nothing. Like trash.

And he thinks about bringing Elias Stern in, in front of all his friends, everyone who thinks he’s the big man and totally unstoppable.

‘Yeah,’ says Ray. ‘It’s right. Come on.’

Kowalski doesn’t say anything after that, just follows Ray into the club. They scouted a back entrance that afternoon – fire escape to the roof, it takes them out into a little hallway where the offices are. The door down to the club itself is locked.

‘Want to do the honours?’

Kowalski gives a small, tight nod and kicks it hard with the flat of his foot. It’s a cheap yale lock, gives up immediately, doesn’t even need a second go. They’re through. The back staircase leads down to the toilets. Ray tries to look casual, but nobody even glances at them.

Then they’re in the middle of the dancefloor. It’s weird, incongruous after the quiet of the car, of the stairway. They make eye contact for a moment, Kowalski ducking his head towards the back, Stern’s private party, but Ray’s already spotted it. He nods. They move between the groups of people dancing, nobody looking at them, and Ray feels adrenalin right to the tips of his fingers. His heart’s fluttering in his chest. This is real, absolution, this matters.

Stern’s area of the club’s roped off and there’s a bouncer watching them come up. He could be with the club, or he could be with Stern – either way, they’ve got to be on the birthday boy as soon as the words are out of Ray’s mouth.

‘Party’s over,’ he says, showing his badge. ‘Chicago PD.’

The bouncer smiles.

Then he turns, yelling, something Ray can’t hear but it’s easy to get the gist, _cops, cops are here_. Kowalski has a gun on the guy and Ray’s past him, between the tables, which are erupting into chaos slowly but surely, because nobody can hear the guy yelling but panic spreads like fire, table to table to table, and then Ray has a gun at Stern’s temple just like he dreamt of. That’s when he feels it: something hard on the back of his head. No noise. Just bass. But he goes down hard and hits the floor.

For a moment, everything’s dark. Stern, he thinks, job to do; other stupid, unconnected words and phrases in his brain, ripples on water.

Stern. Get up, Vecchio. Get up, Vecchio.

‘Get up, Vecchio, get up!’ Ray staggers to his feet. Somebody’s half-pushing, half-pulling him, they’ve got him by the arm. His vision starts to clear.

Back-door. The place had a back-door. Must’ve been hidden behind something because they scoped it out earlier, didn’t they? He came with Fraser. Not Fraser. He came with –

Kowalski’s shouting, ‘Stop! Chicago PD—’

They’re out in the alley and Stern’s running. ‘Come on,’ says Kowalski, dragging him. He’s fine, fine, get off me Kowalski, he can stand just fine without help, and now both of them are running and Ray can see them up ahead, Stern and two other guys making a run for it. One of them shoots blindly over his shoulder. A bullet, two, three, pinging off metal close-by, and then – boom, Kowalski’s got Stern in the leg and he goes down.

There are two guys with Stern, one of them stops to check he’s okay but the other keeps going, wrenching himself up the chain-fence at the back of the alley while his friend shouts, ‘Aaron you fucking asshole.’ Stern’s yelling, bleeding in the road, and they have him, they’ve done it.

‘Hands where we can see them,’ calls Ray. Stern doesn’t move, but the other guy sticks his hands up. The third, by now, is gone.

He and Kowalski draw level, Kowalski bending to cuff the henchman, dragging him to his feet. Ray kicks Stern’s gun away and kneels down beside him. He’s still making a hell of a sound. Some birthday, Ray thinks, trying to keep the grin off his face.

‘You have the right to remain silent,’ he says, rolling Stern over onto his back. He cuffs him. ‘Anything you say will and can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney.’

Ray blinks. There’s blood on Stern’s forehead, which doesn’t make sense, because Kowalski shot him in the leg. Then another drop.

Ray cottons on, touches a hand to the back of his head. Someone must have got him with a bottle, like a fucking western. It’s bleeding pretty badly. For a moment, his vision blurs.

‘Hey Vecchio, you good?’

Ray looks up. Kowalski’s watching him.

‘Yeah,’ he says. He looks back at Stern, cuffed arms thrown up over his face. ‘You have the right to an attorney,’ he repeats. ‘If you cannot afford one…’

  


+

So, fine, okay, maybe he’s not in the best shape of his life. Sitting on the curb while an EMT sponges blood off the back of his neck, Ray’s ready to admit that maybe, just maybw, he hasn’t been doing his all-time-best thinking lately. He wouldn’t mind, except it’s so obvious Kowalski knew: watching him like a hawk the whole time they were waiting to go in, he even gave him the chance to change his mind, it’s _humiliating_.

Ray watches them strap Stern up in his stretcher and stick him in the back of the ambulance, still spitting with fury. He’ll be fine once the painkillers kick in. The EMT giving Ray a once-over pats him on the back. ‘Head wounds bleed a lot,’ she says, standing up. ‘You’ll be all right.’

‘Yeah yeah,’ he says, and grins. ‘I’m all right.’

Kowalski drives him home. The silence in the car is pretty awkward. Ray knows what he ought to say but somehow he can’t bring himself to say it. When they pull up at his place, he says, ‘Want a drink?’, playing for time. It’s half midnight already. Kowalski shakes his head.

‘Look,’ says Ray. ‘I fucked up.’

‘Yeah.’ Kowalski’s mouth is a thin, angry line. ‘I’d give you a piece of my mind if you didn’t have a head wound.’

‘I’m sorry, okay? It won’t happen again. Thank you, for uh – you know.’ Not leaving me to get a lung kicked in by a club full of low-rent drug-dealers. Not letting the guy get away. Wearing your glasses. Being a good shot. Not giving me a piece of your mind.

They look at each other. ‘Sure,’ says Kowalski, after a moment. ‘Take a couple of aspirin before you turn in, okay?’

Ray laughs, gets out of the car and slams the door behind him. He can feel Kowalski’s eyes on his back all the way to the door, doesn’t let out a breath til he’s alone in the lift. Watching him like a hawk. And all the time he knew, knew Ray wasn’t thinking straight. Fucking humiliating.

Inside the apartment, Ray’s answer machine is blinking. He presses play on instinct, thinking about a hundred other things, like where the hell he put the aspirin when he moved in here.

‘Ray?’ says the voice on the machine. ‘It’s Stella Kowalski.’

Ray stops in his tracks. Lucky Kowalski didn’t come up after all.

‘I’m calling to say I’m back from Boston, so – maybe you’re working tonight, but, anyway. I’m around, if you want to have that drink sometime. Give me a call.’

The machine beeps, cuts out. Ray’s standing in his kitchenette. He puts his hands down on the counter, drops his head and sighs. Spilled sugar under his palms. What a woman she is. Just hearing her voice, it all comes back to him – the soft skin of her palms, that look in her eye. Clever. He’s always liked a woman who can run rings around him, he can’t help it. But that surname.

Obviously, he absolutely cannot call her. It’s one more layer of weird than he can handle right now.

But what a waste. What a waste.

  


+

The chase across Union Station is a blur, light, colour, sound, people yelling, people running, but Ray barely notices. His eyes are on the back of the guy they’re after: Eric Klein, AKA Frank Becker, AKA Eric Lee; one man, a hell of a lot of names. He’s a blackmailer, fraudster, extortionist, and one hell of a sprinter.

‘Kowalski, go round,’ he yells, and they take two different routes across the concourse just as Becker, or whoever the hell he is, takes the stairs down to the platforms.

Ray hasn’t run like this since he was shot – actually, thinking about it, since _immediately before_ he got shot – and there’s a pain in his chest that if he stops to think about it is probably roughly there. So he doesn’t stop to think. Up ahead, people are scattering and he can hear somebody screaming, ‘He has a gun!’

He wonders if they’re talking about him, because they don’t know he’s a cop, or if Becker’s done something way more serious than what they’re chasing him for, and just how desperate is this guy anyway?

Then suddenly they have him cornered, Kowalski bounding up towards them from the other side, and Ray sees the gun in Becker’s hand right away. Huh, he thinks. Then he stops thinking.

Later, an hour or so later, once Becker’s been booked and they’re alone, heading back to the car, Kowalski snaps. Suddenly Ray’s pushed up against the back wall of the station while Kowalski hisses, ‘Fuck’s _sake_ , Vecchio,’ through his teeth. He’s not that much taller, but he’s taller, and angry, and the anger makes him seem taller still.

‘What the—’ Ray starts, hackles up immediately, but Kowalski doesn’t want a proper fight, he’s just holding Ray in place, shaking him, like trying to actually, physically shake sense into him.

‘Hey listen to me, you listen to me,’ Kowalski’s saying. ‘Maybe you got something to prove, maybe you’re fucked up about whatever you’re fucked up about and you wanna go round risking your life about it, but not me, okay? Not my life.’

‘Get off me,’ Ray spits, but Kowalski doesn’t let go.

He can remember having this argument with Fraser once, the other way around, obviously. And it’s insane because Kowalski’s right. They chased a suspect through a busy station, public shoot-out, and the gun, and Ray just – jumped on him, like he was a bucking bronco at some country show, and it was all so – well, so _Fraser_. Charging in without a thought for life or limb.

Now it’s over, Ray can see it all how Kowalski saw it, the exact moments he made the wrong call: go instead of stay, forward instead of back, tackling Klein like a rookie. Throwing himself at a gun only five weeks after he got a bullet in the lung. Which is all well and good, and his business, but if the gun had gone off, who was standing behind him?

So Kowlaski’s right and, really, Ray knows it. For a moment, calmer, he says, ‘Okay, look, okay.’ Kowalski’s grip starts to slacken. But then he doesn’t quite let go, and he’s looking at Ray in that awful, searching way he looked at him back at the nightclub, and suddenly Ray can’t bear it.

‘Didn’t you hear? I said _back off_ ,’ and he shoves Kowalski, desperate now to push him away, get free. ‘I get the message okay?’

‘Do you?’ says Kowalski, not rising, and his voice is quiet and dangerous. ‘Hey, look at me – do you understand what I’m saying to you?’

Ray gives up, stops struggling, like a kid having a tantrum who’s tired himself out. They look at each other. Kowalski’s red in the face and not backing down, and he’s being reasonable, and he’s worried, which is the worst thing of all, but he’s also angry, and that’s what Ray wants. Be angry, he thinks, just be angry with me, because that, I know how to handle.

‘All right, I’ve had my time out, now will you let _go_ of me,’ and finally he’s taken Kowalski by surprise, pushed him away. They stand in the street, panting and not, for a moment, meeting each other’s eyes.

‘I’m saying you’ve gotta _rein it in_ , Vecchio,’ Kowalski says, voice breaking, high and dumb and, thank god, furious. ‘Talk to somebody, cry about it, do whatever you need to do, I don’t care, but while we’re working together, no more dumb fucking risks, you hear me?’

‘I said _okay_ ,’ Ray spits, but underneath he’s thinking, Oh, fuck you Kowalski, fuck _you_.

  


+

‘Stella? It’s me.’

‘Ray,’ she says, and the sound of her smile curls up warm in his ear and stays there.

‘I’m glad I caught you.’

‘Me too.’

‘So I hear you’re back from Boston?’

‘Oh, did a little birdy tell you?’ she says, voice low and amused, and heat pools in Ray’s belly. What was he thinking, not calling this woman? This is not the kind of woman you _don’t call_.

‘Yeah,’ he says dumbly. ‘So, uh. So I was wondering if maybe I could take you out this weekend?’

  


+

‘What are you still doing here?’ Welsh is stood over Ray’s desk, arms folded, face like thunder. ‘Don’t you have somewhere to be at three o’clock, detective?’

Ray looks at him, incredulous. That’s what passes for discreet around here. Then he looks at the time. Already ten past three.

‘Look,’ he says slowly. ‘Sir—’

‘Don’t you _look, sir_ me,’ Welsh snaps. ‘Get your butt up there or I’ll have you back in uniform by Monday morning. Psych assessments are mandatory post-undercover, you hear me Vecchio? Man. Da. To. Ry.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ says Ray, shoving his keys and wallet in his pocket, throwing his jacket on. Kowalski’s suddenly very interested in whatever he’s reading, trying to look like he’s not listening.

‘I’ll come back if I make it out alive,’ says Ray.

There’s a room booked on the fourth floor: that’s the only good thing about having this shit organised by the department, the shrink comes to you. In the lift, Ray leans against the wall and looks at his watch, thinking, Worth a go. He’s already twelve minutes late, so that’s twelve less minutes of getting his brain x-rayed by Doctor Doom, and he can chalk that up to a win.

It’s ridiculous, really. He’s been back long enough to make, what, five? Six decent arrests, already? And get shot into the bargain – so by any measure that counts, Armando’s dead and Ray Vecchio’s doing his old job again, like he never left. And only now, _now_ have the guys upstairs taken notice. Wheels are turning, Ray thinks. The lift dings. He goes into room 4.19.

There’s a stuff-shirt guy sitting there waiting for him, clean-shaven and well-dressed. ‘You must be Detective Vecchio,’ he says. British accent or old money East Coast?

‘I am,’ says Ray, shaking his hand. ‘Sorry about the time. I was, uh – I got held up by a—’

‘Course you did,’ the guy interrupts, business-like but not annoyed. ‘Let’s save all that and get started, shall we? I’m Dr. Barratt. Take a seat.’

So Ray sits and lets Barratt start in on the questions. If he was expecting an interrogation, he doesn’t get it; it’s more like polite, after dinner conversation. Are you glad to be back in Chicago? Where are you living? Oh, you live alone – does that bother you? Do you prefer to live alone? Ray starts telling stories about sharing a bathroom with Frannie all through his teens, thinking: this is easy, I’m gonna _ace_ this, look how fine I am. Then Barratt says, ‘And physically you’re well?’

‘Physically?’

‘I believe you were injured recently – in, as they say, the line of duty.’

‘Oh,’ Ray shrugs. He wonders if Barratt’s asking about the bullet or the headwound. What a month.

‘But you’re feeling all right? Recovering?’

‘Sure?’ Ray says uncertainly. ‘I mean, a little uh – sore, I guess? I get tired.’ He shakes his head. ‘But actually I mean, if it doesn’t sound too macho to say this, I’ve been shot before, so, psychologically, you know, it’s fine.’ He pauses. ‘And uh, you know. It wasn’t anything to do with the undercover stuff.’

‘Hmm?’ Barratt looks up from his notes.

‘I mean, I wasn’t shot while I was undercover.’

‘No, no, of course. It was on your,’ he checks his notes, ‘first _day_ back on active duty? Good lord.’

‘Yeah, so I just, I’m not really sure why you’re asking about it.’

Barratt blinks. ‘Well,’ he says slowly. ‘I’m simply trying to get a good, all-round sense of where you’re up to.’

‘Right. Except I thought we were here to talk about the undercover stuff. Not my wider, what’s the word? Capacity.’

‘That’s right. But your superior brought it up, and—’

‘You been talking to Welsh?’

Barratt smiles, but he’s starting to look a little pissed off under the nice, neat, professional mask. ‘It’s standard practice. I need to conduct a 360-degree assessment of your character, your mental state, everything. If I were to see and speak to only you – well, you’re a policeman, Detective. You know as well as anyone that people can be tricky, hard to read.’

‘Sure but not me, though, doc,’ Ray jokes.

Barratt doesn’t even crack a smile. ‘But you’re saying you feel well enough to conduct your duties?’ he presses, looking at Ray out of the corner of his eye in a way that Ray suddenly realises is just like Welsh, just the sort of look _he’s_ been giving Ray recently. Then it clicks.

The golden bullet. Welsh hasn’t asked him the same question, but Ray’s seen him thinking it, thinking: Ray Vecchio, you’re looking a gift-horse in the mouth, why the hell don’t you retire and do something nice with your life?

He doesn’t know what to say to Welsh about it, and Welsh is a good guy and he gets it, so if Ray doesn’t know how to tell it to him, he sure as hell doesn’t know how to explain to this soft-face, soft-palmed stranger – with his neat notebook and his neat pencil and his neat shoes – that he has no idea how to pick up all the pieces of himself as it is, so what’s he gonna do, drop even the ones he’s got and start over?

‘I’m _fine_ ,’ he says, a little too intensely, and Barratt looks at him. Might as well pick a new name altogether, might as well go into witness protection at this rate. Who is Ray Vecchio anyway? he thinks, and in his head he hears the answer: The guy with the Mountie for a partner.

Something in Barratt’s face softens, and he smiles. ‘Well that’s good. If you’re feeling fine, that’s good news.’

‘Yeah,’ Ray says slowly. It’s quiet. After a moment he adds, ‘Well, I mean, it’s my job isn’t it? I don’t really know how to do anything else.’

  


+

Having Frannie out with everyone for Friday night drinks is one of the newer and stranger developments in Ray’s increasingly fucked up existence. Somehow her being in the bullpen hadn’t been too bad – he’s been tuning out the background noise of his sister’s voice since he was a little kid, it’s not so hard – but this? Her being one of the guys, out for a few beers at the end of the week? It’s way, way too weird.

‘One of us really ought to move precincts,’ he says, shaking his head, and Frannie laughs. They’re sat together up at the bar drinking wine, white for her, red for him.

‘I’ll go,’ she says. Impossible to tell if she’s joking. ‘You were here first, it’s only fair.’

‘Well, and no Fraser anymore, so what are you still hanging around for?’

Frannie looks offended, which, given her record, is rich. ‘I wasn’t just there for _Fraser_ ,’ she says.

‘Oh, sure,’ Ray says, laughing. ‘ _Sure_.’

‘Don’t be an asshole,’ she says. ‘For some reason, I was _worried_ about you, did you know that? It was nice being with people all day who knew you, the real you.’

Unthinkingly, both of them glance at Kowalski. He’s down the bar, talking to Welsh and gesticulating. At this distance, there’s something blurred about his movements, stilted, like he’s had too much to drink.

‘So,’ says Frannie, lowering her voice. ‘Do you know what went on up there or what?’

‘Went on up where?’

She shakes her head. ‘You’re dense, Ray Vecchio, did anyone ever tell you that? For somebody who works things out for a living, you can be real _dense_.’

‘Well maybe if you’d speak plain English--’

‘In _Canada_ ,’ she says, like it’s so obvious.

‘What about Canada? What are you talking about?’

‘I gotta spell it out for you, okay, I will: Ray Kowalski goes off with Fraser, right, solving crime, however crime gets solved up there—’

‘On dog sleds.’

‘On dog sleds, okay, so they’re off dog sledding and whatever else, and then we get a radio through that they’ve caught their man, and that’s a couple of days after they left.’

‘Okay.’

‘ _Okay_ , so then where’s Ray Kowalski for the next two weeks, and why won’t he talk about anything that happened after their big boom-bang-shoot-out thing?’

‘Frannie—’

‘I’m serious, you think the two of them had a fight or something?’

Ray thinks about it, and wonders why he never thought about it before. Kowalski stayed on ten days, maybe two weeks longer than he had to, doing what? Ray hadn’t noticed because, at the time, he hadn’t thought Kowalski was coming back – surely he had his own name, his own job to go back to now the real Ray Vecchio was home. Only he didn’t. He’d shown up a couple of weeks later all weird and shifty, with his tail between his legs.

‘I guess,’ Ray says slowly. ‘I guess he just – took a holiday. While he was there.’

‘So why won’t he _talk_ about it?’ Frannie says, rolling her eyes.

‘Hey, are you gonna dance with your brother or what?’

Both their heads snap up immediately, kids caught out in misbehaviour. Kowalski’s behind them, a little rumpled, grinning at Frannie with a hand on both their shoulders. He doesn’t seem to have noticed anything. ‘Fake brother,’ he adds, with a wink at Ray.

Ray feels panicked, the sweaty-palmed feeling of somebody being behind you who you’ve just been talking about – but it’s loud in here, it’s fine, he’s almost sure Kowalski couldn’t hear a word. And Frannie looks how he feels, panic at the edge of her eyes just like when they were kids. She says, ‘Oh _sure_ ,’ way too loud, and bounces off the stool into Kowalski’s arms.

Ray sits and watches. Kowalski dances surprisingly well, and real honourable, hands just where they ought to be, like a man who knows her big brother’s watching. There’s a certainty in his movements that Ray doesn’t always see there, though whether that’s because he loves dancing (who the hell outside their sixties _loves_ dancing) or because he’s just the right side of just enough to drink, it’s hard to say.

‘How’d it go with Doctor Barratt?’

Ray looks round. Welsh is there, holding a lime and soda. As he never fails to remind them on nights like this, he went through traffic on his way up the force. One DUI collision’s enough to put you off for a lifetime, apparently.

‘Uh, fine, sir,’ says Ray. ‘I’ll be cleared in no time.’

Welsh rolls his eyes. ‘I didn’t ask you as your boss, Vecchio. Was it okay?’

Oh. Ray wets his lips, considers his answer. ‘It was – weird. Sir.’

‘Weird, huh?’ Welsh nods. ‘Well that’s all right. You can get through weird, can’t you?’

‘I sure can.’

‘And you’ve got, what, five of these?’

‘Five total, yeah. Four more to go.’

‘Great. Good. And then you’ll be – back to normal.’

Ray wonders whether to bring it up, the golden bullet thing. Wonders whether it’s worth trying to say to Welsh what he couldn’t say to Barratt all afternoon. ‘Sir,’ he says. Then Welsh’s eyes slip away, following something over his shoulder.

‘Good god, will you look at that?’

Ray looks. On the dance floor, Kowalski’s twirling some lady-cop from the floor below like they’re on a cruise ship show. Again the surety of his movement is surprising, but also the _display_ of it, like he’s dancing for everybody else’s benefit. Ray thinks, with sudden certainty: So he is drunk. But he can’t say exactly how he knows.

Welsh shakes his head. ‘I haven’t been able to do that with my hips for fifteen years,’ he mutters sadly.

‘Are you talking about him or the girl, sir?’

‘Funny man,’ says Welsh, but he’s smiling. ‘You want something to drink?’

Ray looks at the dregs of his red wine and wonders if he does. Thinking about Barratt’s brought on a wave of exhaustion and embarrassment. He’s gonna feel weird tomorrow as it is, already it’s like he’s had a layer of skin scraped off, probably he doesn’t need hangover blues on top of everything else. ‘Club soda?’

‘Sure,’ says Welsh. He gets the barkeep’s attention, orders two, hands one over with a nod.

‘Thanks,’ says Ray.

‘Don’t mention it.’

That’s the last Ray sees of him for an hour or so. It’s not til he’s stood chatting with Morton that he feels a grip on his upper arm and turns to find Welsh looking at him. Ray thought he would’ve gone home already. But he’s here, leaning into Ray’s ear and saying, quiet, ‘Your partner could do with a hand, okay? Good man.’

And before Ray knows any more about it, he’s out in the parking lot, loading Kowalski into his car like so much fucking grocery shopping, except all limbs.

‘You taking me home, Ray Vecchio?’ Kowalski says. For some reason he seems to think that’s funny.

‘Yeah,’ says Ray. ‘I’m taking you home. Keep still, okay?’ He’s a little buzzed himself, not from drinking but from having all those familiar faces packed into one room, like being high on his own life. Anyway, he nearly says something corny about them being partners, Welsh’s words still ringing in his ears, and that’s when he realises he hadn’t stopped to question it for a second. Welsh said partner, he went looking for Kowalski. Just like that.

‘What?’ says Kowalski.

Ray blinks. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Buckle up.’

They’re quiet on the drive, and by the time they pull up at Kowalski’s apartment, he seems subdued. Ray gets out of the car and follows him up, though he doesn’t really know why. Kowalski’s not drunk enough to need a hand or anything. He just follows – and if Kowalski thinks it’s a funny thing to do, he doesn’t say anything about it.

The apartment’s dark, empty-feeling, like nobody spends much time here. Streetlights catch on the dirty windows, giving everything an orange fuzz. Kowalski flicks a light on and says, ‘Drink?’

‘Nah.’ Ray watches Kowalski pours himself a glass of something, maybe whisky, he can’t make out the label. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying it,’ he adds, ‘but this place is kind of depressing.’

Kowalski huffs a laugh and slumps down onto the couch. Ray leans in the doorway, not sure if he ought to sit down or what exactly he’s hanging around for. ‘ _This_ place?’ says Kowalski. ‘At least I’m not living in an office.’

‘Who’s living in an office?’

‘Fraser.’

Ray tenses. For whatever reason, they haven’t really talked about him, all this time – not since the first day. But Kowalski doesn’t seem to notice, he just carries on talking. ‘Whole time I knew him, he was sleeping in a camp bed at the consulate.’

‘Bullshit, what happened to his apartment?’

‘He said it burned down.’

‘It burned _down_?’ Ray blinks, trying to picture the building not being there anymore. ‘But Fraser loved that place. I once watched him filibuster a council meeting for, like, two and a half _hours_ for that fleapit.’

‘You watched him fuck-what-y a what?’

‘I can’t believe it burned down, what happened?’

Kowalski shrugs, downs his drink in one. Suddenly it’s like all the air’s gone out of him. He puts the glass on his coffee table and slumps back with his arms on his knees. Watching him, it occurs to Ray for the first time that Kowalski is miserable, really miserable. How hadn’t he noticed before? Too wrapped up in himself, in his own problems. He hears Frannie’s voice back at the bar: Dense, Ray Vecchio, you are _dense_.

He goes a little way into the room and sits on the arm of the couch, trying for casual. ‘So,’ he says slowly. ‘You… Are you all right?’

Inadequate to come out and ask when it’s clear that, for whatever reason, Kowalski is not. They look at each other. Kowalski says, ‘Sure,’ and shrugs, a slow, rolling motion. Suddenly and for the first time, Ray can picture him with Stella, the image dropping into his mind fully-formed and entirely un-asked-for, a slow roll of limbs, Kowalski’s arms around her shoulders. Ray blinks.

Kowalski lets out a long, low breath and then tips his head back on the couch, eyes shut. Ray looks at the line of his neck, trying not to think about the two of them together, not to think about Stella at all. Stanley and Stella, like a joke. A bad joke.

‘I don’t know,’ Kowalski says quietly, voice strange and far away. ‘Hard to know who I am if I’m not – the guy with the Mountie for a partner.’

It’s so oddly similar to the thought he’d had with Barratt that afternoon that Ray laughs, a bark of a laugh so loud and, presumably, so unexpected, that Kowalski looks up. ‘Sorry,’ Ray says. ‘I just – yeah. I know that one.’

He feels weird, unsettled, doesn’t want to talk about this now, about Fraser, though a few days ago he was looking for an opening. Now he just wants to get home and to bed.

‘Listen,’ he says, ‘you’re drunk okay? That’s all. You’ll feel better in the morning.’ Kowalski huffs a laugh but doesn’t move.

Ray stands up and says, with forced cheerfulness, ‘Sure, Stanley, sleep there and get a crick in your neck if you want to.’

Kowalski’s head snaps up, eyes wild, too angry, too fast. ‘Don’t call me that, I don’t like being called that.’

Incredible, the way this guy turns on a knife edge, just when you think you’ve got things the right way up. ‘Sure, whatever. So get some sleep, Ray Vecchio.’

Something flickers in Kowalski’s face, shutters. Then he laughs. ‘Funny man,’ he says.

‘You know, everybody tells me that.’ They look at each other. Ray tries not to think about whatever it is that they’re not saying. He wonders what it is. Maybe he doesn’t want to know.

‘Okay,’ he says slowly, ‘well, okay, see you,’ and goes to the door. But in the hall, he hears Kowalski’s voice call after him.

‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

Tomorrow’s a Saturday and neither of them are down to work. So Kowalski means – socially. After the bad time Ray’s given him lately, he feels sort of touched.

But he says, ‘Family stuff, sorry. Some other time,’ and ducks out the front door before Kowalski can notice anything in his voice. Because of course, it’s not family he’s seeing at all.

Ray swings the apartment door shut and leans against it, rubbing his eyes. He’d be an idiot not to take Stella out tomorrow: women like that don’t wash up on the shore just every day, and that’s all there is to it. But all the same, there’s a feeling at the back of his neck like he’d get sometimes talking to Fraser, when he said, ‘That’s just how the world is,’ or ‘I’ve done all I can do.’ A feeling like he’s being disappointing. Like he’s letting somebody down.

  


+

‘The back of the head? That must have hurt.’

‘ _Hurt_?’ Ray says. ‘You bet it did. But I was a real big boy about it.’ And Stella grins in a way that makes Ray go as dumb as a schoolkid at a dance.

They’re eating in a new Thai place she wanted to try. Ray likes that she chose the restaurant, told him what time to pick her up, how smart to dress. He likes a woman who knows herself and her mind, won’t just sit around waiting for him to call – she’s a real person, a grown-up.

It helps that they’ve both been married before, though of course Ray steers all talk away from that as quickly as possible. He hasn’t exactly told Stella that he and Kowalski are working together, just like he hasn’t told Kowalski all about him and Stella, how they hit it off the moment they met – there hasn’t been a right way, a right moment, with either of them.

But anyway, this thing with Kowalski, working together, it’s just temporary. When his badge is sorted out, they’ll be able to go their separate ways, unknit all the bits of their lives that have got so weird and enmeshed. Everything will come out in the wash.

He and Stella are on dessert, talking about how hard it is to keep a life together outside work when they do the kind of jobs they do. Of course, these last few years, it’s been harder than Ray could really explain or expect anyone to understand, but that’s definitely not a first date conversation.

‘I never dance anymore,’ she says sadly, pulling a spoon across her coconut ice cream.

‘No?’ Abruptly, Ray remembers Kowalski last night, watching him spin that lady-cop like they were on a cruise. ‘And that’s something you used to do with your, uh – with K—’ He coughs. ‘With your ex-husband?’

Stella nods. ‘Ray and I started dancing when we were young. But it stuck. Longer than the marriage, of course.’ She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes, and then shudders, a tiny, delicate shudder, like a ripple across water. ‘Sorry. The names. It’s a little strange, isn’t it?’

Ray blinks at her, thinking: You don’t know the half of it. But what he says is, ‘I’m sorry to hear that, about the dancing. I mean, I’d offer to take you out sometime, but I’m uh – I’m not much of a dancer. I mean, I’m okay, but I’m no—’ Ray Kowalski. ‘No expert,’ he finishes, lamely.

The names. That surname. What the hell is he doing here? How’s he got himself into this mess? He should get up, walk out of here, get the hell away from both of them. But Stella, smiling, hooks a toe around the back of his leg and says, ‘Well that’s all right. I could get you trained up in no time at all.’

Ray swallows. ‘Is that right?’

‘That’s right,’ she says.

And suddenly he’s not thinking about Kowalski anymore, not at all. _Kowalski who?_ he thinks, as he and his partner’s ex-wife smile at each other over dessert.

  


+

The real family thing is on Sunday, a big Vecchio lunch. He picks Frannie up in his crappy, borrowed Toyota and takes her to church. Then they all go back to Ma’s for food.

Time was, he’d have gone home for meals three or four nights a week – after his divorce, it was good, good to tell himself he was keeping an eye on them all, that somebody needed him. But since he got back from Vegas, it’s been hard. He has to make more of an effort.

It’s a warm, late spring day, really beautiful. They open all the dining room windows and somebody pours huge glasses of red wine from a series of bottles. Ma’s baked bread, they eat it stood around the table, chatting, tearing off huge great handfuls, and then Ma comes out with a bowl of pasta alla norcina and everyone scrabbles to sit down. It’s noisy, chaotic, very safe. Hard to remember he was ever anywhere else.

Afterwards, he drives Frannie home again. It’s the best part of the year, this, just starting to get warm, before the city gets that stale smell, like old garbage. Frannie opens her window and gets the wind in her hair. She looks beautiful in a way that makes him feel old and soft and proud of her.

They talk about nothing most of the way; then, two blocks from her house, idling at some lights, she gets a look on her face like she’s gonna give him bad news. His heart sinks. ‘Ray,’ she says. ‘Are we ever gonna talk about what happened while you were gone?’

He looks at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that every time I ask, you make some stupid joke about cars and watches and silk ties and I have _actually_ no idea what you’ve been _doing_ with yourself for eighteen months.’

‘That’s because it’s secret, Frannie. I was undercover.’

‘But we’re—’

‘And didn’t I say? I’ve been driving round Las Vegas in the back of a limo, my head sticking out the window like a puppy. That’s the truth.’

‘I’m not a little kid.’

‘Frannie.’

‘Ray Kowalski says you won’t talk to him either.’

Ray blinks. There’s something funny about the thought of them discussing him. He probes the feeling, like putting your tongue on a bad tooth after a fight. Is he angry? No. It feels kind of – nice. ‘You talk to Kowalski about me?’ he says casually.

‘Only sometimes. He keeps an eye on you.’

‘For you?’

‘For – I don’t know. I would’ve said for Fraser, if they were talking.’

‘You don’t know that they’re not.’

‘Trust me, I know.’

‘You shouldn’t bother him with this stuff Frannie, okay? He’s got his own shit going on.’

‘Well it’s _him_ that always asks _me_ how you’re doing,’ she says indignantly, ‘and not the other way around. Okay?’ Suddenly she slaps a hand over her mouth. ‘Not that I don’t care, obviously – and Ma—’

He waves a hand. ‘No, look, it’s fine. I get it. Hey, can I let you out here?’

Alone in the car, he turns up the music. There’s a feeling in his stomach that he doesn’t know how to name. Probably it’s from being full and virtuous – church, home-cooking, wine at lunchtime – and that’s all. But he sings along with every stupid song that comes on the radio, all the way home.

  


+

Back in room 4.19, it’s one of those days where the sun hasn’t come up, dirty city light through the windows making everything look gray. Ray’s focus is drifting, wondering how this would be if they did it wherever Barratt usually works; if he’d be lying down on some fancy couch instead of sat here, smelling the canteen food smell drifting up from the bottom floor.

‘Detective Vecchio?’

Ray blinks. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I was thinking about something else. Can you repeat that?’

‘I said, do you feel that things are how you left them, broadly speaking?’

Ray’s unsettled, though it’s hard to say why. It’s a simple question with a simple answer. ‘Yes,’ he says, except his voice sounds weird.

Barratt licks his lower lip and doesn’t reply. The quiet stretches between them a while, not long, but soon too much to bear.

‘Well,’ Ray adds. ‘Pretty much.’

‘Pretty much?’

‘Yeah. You know, time doesn’t stand still for eighteen months, does it? My sister’s kids have gotten older, my mother’s knees have gotten worse, things like that.’

‘And how do you feel about that?’

‘Feel about it?’ Ray says, a little incredulous, then stops. How does he feel about it? ‘Well, I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. That’s life, isn’t it? You know the world’s going to go on turning without you.’

‘You know, that’s the kind of thing people say about--’

‘What?’

‘Death. Dying.’

Ray laughs. ‘Well it was a bit like that. Putting your life on ice, not knowing whether you’ll be coming back to it or what. Wanting to leave things – you know. Nice. Just in case.’

‘And did you still feel like that while you were away?’

‘Like what?’

Barratt makes a thinking face, puts his head on one side. Dark hair, pale eyes. Ray hadn’t noticed before but he’s kind of good-looking. To be honest, he’s not sure why he’s noticing it now. ‘Well,’ Barratt says at length. ‘Let me put it another way. How often, while you were away, did you think about your real life? Your home, your work – the people waiting for you back in Chicago.’

Ray laughs again. ‘No offence, Doc, but you don’t know much about this kind of thing, do you?’

‘I know a little,’ Barratt says lightly, but he looks amused. ‘Less than you. Why don’t you explain?’

‘Rule one of undercover: if you don’t believe it, they don’t believe it. You gotta _be_ this person, really _become_ them – think like them, act like them, do what they do. Now, how are you gonna be thinking about your family and all the folks back home while you’re doing that?’

Barratt inclines his head. It’s a gesture that reminds him, suddenly and powerfully, of Fraser. Abruptly, there’s a strange, tight feeling in Ray’s chest.

‘So you’re saying you thought about home very little.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Which must make it – almost overwhelming to be back.’

And then Ray feels it, the terrible thickness in his throat, the blurring in his eyes; he coughs to cover it, but already knows there’s no escape. Awful, awful, inevitable, unstoppable, and he feels some echo of the panic he used to feel when he got in trouble as a kid, trying not to cry in front of Dad. He covers his face with a hand. _Shrink’s gonna have a field day with you, Vecchio._

‘You don’t need to be embarrassed,’ Barratt says quietly. ‘It’s natural to – feel – big emotions. At a time like this.’

Ray says nothing. There’s no getting away from the terrible crying feeling now, he’s inside of it. He bites down hard on his lip, eyes squeezed tight shut, and tries to picture the parts of movies where people fall over.

‘I don’t know if it helps to hear this, but I think what you did was very brave. Going undercover like that, at great personal risk.’

‘Stop talking please,’ says Ray, not taking his hand away from his eyes. He hears Barratt laugh, a quiet, rather unexpected sound.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘That’s all right, Detective Vecchio. We can just sit here for a little while.’

  


+

Ray’s still asleep when the sound starts, a buzzing, loud and insistent. He doesn’t recognise it. Half asleep, he thinks of car horns in the street, a neighbour’s phone, covers his head with his pillow wishing it would stop.

Then it clicks: that’s his apartment buzzer. This is the first visitor he’s had since he moved in here, and it’s – Ray glances at his alarm clock as he rolls out of bed – six thirty in the fucking morning. At the front door, he pushes the intercom button hard with the pad of his thumb and imagines pushing it into the eyeball of whoever’s down there.

‘This better be good,’ he says.

‘Kowalski. Can I come up?’

Ray blinks dumbly, then buzzes him in. He has about thirty seconds before Kowalski gets here. He looks down at his pyjamas. ‘Hmm,’ he says. He’s still standing there, half-asleep, when the knock comes. He swings the door open.

‘You couldn’t wait another couple hours to see me?’

‘Believe it or not, this ain’t a social call,’ Kowalski says, coming inside. Ray shuts the door behind him. Kowalski, fully dressed, stands in the middle of Ray’s living room, looking him up and down. The corner of his mouth twitches.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Nice pyjamas, Vecchio.’

‘It’s six thirty in the _morning_.’

‘I know, I brought you a coffee.’

Ray accepts it gratefully. ‘So what’s going on?’ he says, taking a sip. Bitter. He makes a face.

Kowalski raises his eyebrows. ‘What?’

‘Nothing, it’s fine. No sugar.’

‘You don’t take sugar,’ Kowalski says, and then, hearing how that sounds, he laughs. ‘I got a file on you this thick, man, I was you.’

Ray shakes his head. ‘Yeah, no, you’re right. You _were_ right. But uh – Armando did. So.’

They look at each other. After a moment, both of them start to laugh, low and sort of polite, until it gets out of hand. Suddenly Ray’s laughing with the sort of abandon you feel when you’re half asleep in front of a colleague at six thirty in the morning, and he’s you, and you’re somebody else. When it subsides, Ray’s bent double and holding his knees, Kowalski leaning up against the wall for support.

‘Jesus Christ, what a mess,’ says Kowalski, wiping his eyes.

‘You said it.’ Ray feels light-headed but sort of free. Sort of better than he has in a while.

‘Anyway, look, Welsh called me at home, said I had to get you and come in.’

‘Something wrong?’

Kowalski raises his arms in a shrug that means: your guess is as good as mine.

‘Fine. Give me ten minutes to get dressed?’

‘Sure,’ says Kowalski. ‘Can I sit down?’

The sofa’s covered with boxes. ‘You can try.’

Ray showers and dresses at double-speed, because the thought of Kowalski sitting out there in his weird, miserable little apartment is one layer of weird too many. When he goes back into the living room, pulling a sweater on with his shoes still unlaced, Kowalski’s cleared a little space for himself. He’s sat on the couch, looking around with polite, discreet interest. It’s a detective’s eye – no judgement, just taking things in, filing information away for later – but he stops as soon as Ray enters and meets his eyes.

‘I hope you don’t mind me saying,’ he says slowly. ‘But, uh. This place is pretty depressing.’

‘Very funny,’ says Ray. He stops off by the kitchenette to spoon sugar in his coffee, can feel Kowalski’s eyes on his back as he does it; suddenly he doesn’t want to know what Kowalski thinks about it, doesn’t look at him as he says, ‘Come on, let’s go.’

The ride’s short and quiet. At the precinct, Morton’s already on duty. He seems to be expecting them – they’re wanted in the morgue for a cause of death ruling, body brought in overnight.

‘You know who this is?’ says Morton.

‘We don’t know anything,’ says Kowalski, rubbing the back of his neck. He doesn’t like being on the back foot like this, Ray can tell, he seems uneasy, kind of unsettled. Maybe like somebody with a bad feeling. Intuition of one kind or another, they’ve all got it; cops are a superstitious breed.

‘Gordon Marcus.’

‘Wait,’ says Ray. ‘Didn’t he just get out of here?’

Marcus was Elias Stern’s right-hand man, they brought him in with his boss after – all that. The headwound, the gunshot, the alleyway. Not Ray’s finest hour. He thinks of it with a shudder. Anyway, they had Gordon Marcus up on racketeering, extortion, dealing, all kinds of stuff – but as far as Ray knew he’d been offered a pretty good deal to testify against Stern, and got bailed.

‘Bingo,’ Morton says, making a little finger-gun sign with his hand. ‘Got out yesterday, around two pm. Came back at three this morning in a body bag.’

‘Yikes,’ says Kowalski.

‘Yikes is it,’ says Morton. ‘So I guess this one’s yours, boys.’

The autopsy is short, because it’s so obviously the bullet in the back of Gordon Marcus’s head that killed him. The doctor’s eating a piece of toast with one hand while she points things out to them with the other: blood pooling in the face that tells her he was left where he was shot, face-down in a backstreet; abrasions that show her he hit the ground without his hands coming up to break his fall. She crunches away intermittently as she talks, and Kowalski goes a pale but distinct shade of green. Ray sympathises. He’s never felt less like breakfast.

‘So what is this,’ he says, heading back down to the bullpen. ‘Somebody taking out Stern’s trash for him or what?’

‘Gordon Marcus turned state’s evidence pretty quick. Makes sense somebody would’ve wanted him out the way.’

‘But mainly Stern.’

‘But mainly Stern, yeah.’

‘Who’s in custody.’

‘Who remains, at this moment, in custody.’

They sit down at their desk, Kowalski frowning like a kid working on a math problem. Ray can almost picture him with the pen between his teeth. Dollars to doughnuts, he was a pen chewer at school. ‘What?’ Ray says.

Kowalski shakes his head. ‘Nothing.’

‘Something’s bothering you.’

‘No,’ says Kowalski, but in a way that means Yes.

‘It’s bothering me too. Something feels wrong, something we missed.’

Kowalski looks at him, and they’re quiet a moment, thinking.

‘Okay,’ Kowalski says at length. ‘So, could be this is somebody wanting to impress Stern, stay on his good side, waiting on a nice little reward when he gets out.’

‘Could be. Could be a power vacuum thing.’

‘Moving in on Stern’s territory?’

‘He’s inside, who knows how long for, and there’s no clear successor. Or maybe it was Gordon Marcus, but he’s a traitor now, so – boom. King’s in prison, new king’s dead, long live the new-new king.’

‘Maybe,’ says Kowalski. Then he sighs and drops his head in his hands. His voice comes out muffled. ‘What are we missing?’

‘Back of the head, that’s business. It was cold, brutal, calculated. It’s got to be one of those two things, it’s gotta be professional.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Emotional stuff, revenge stuff, it’s face-to-face, it’s right in the chest. You know?’

‘Right.’

‘Unless.’ Ray blinks. ‘ _Unless_.’

Kowalski looks up. ‘Unless what?’

‘Unless they thought if Marcus could see them, he’d overpower them. Physically I mean. He was a big guy, right? What if it was a woman?’

Kowalski’s looking at him with wide eyes. ‘A—’

And suddenly Ray knows they’re thinking the same thing. ‘Your snitch, he said Mitch Fryer took Stern’s girlfriend out. And we got so caught up on Stern we never thought – we never even looked for her—’

‘Come on,’ says Kowalski, and then they’re out of the bullpen without another word.

Heading out, they pass Welsh on his way in. He raises his morning coffee to them. ‘That’s what I like to see,’ he says cheerfully.

  


+

Kowalski’s snitch is a skinny little guy called Mike Peach, but a peach he is not. He’s wearing an unwashed-looking tracksuit, stinking of desperation, and somehow doesn’t look surprised to see them. They find him drinking convenience store coffee on the corner of his street. He raises his eyebrows as they reach him. ‘Back again?’ he says.

‘You wanna tell us whatever you were holding out on us last time?’ says Kowalski. There’s a twitch in his muscles like he might kick off any moment.

Peach grins. ‘Sure. You wanna buy me a better breakfast than this?’

It takes ten minutes to reach his diner of choice, somewhere big, off the road, dark at the back, so he doesn’t risk being seen by anyone who knows him, and which does waffles just how he likes. By the time they get in and seated, Ray’s sincerely worried that Kowalski’s gonna put the guy’s head through the table for afters.

‘So Stern’s girlfriend,’ says Ray, soon as they’re sitting nicely, and Peach grins.

‘Now that’s the million-dollar question,’ he says. Then he turns his attention to the menu. ‘Excuse me.’

Kowalski practically growls at him. ‘Easy,’ says Ray under his breath.

As they sit there waiting, Ray’s eyes drift to the people working behind the counter, morning shift diner waitresses, looking tired. Hair hanging out of buns. He thinks about these women, and about Mitch Fryer, who couldn’t make ends meet on his coffee shop job. And then everything slides into focus, and he thinks: Oh.

Once he knows, it’s so obvious. He nearly grabs Kowalski by the arm and blurts it out, but that’s the wrong play. So Ray waits, lets Peach order, asks their waitress for two breakfast sandwiches to go, letting Kowalski broil away quietly beside him the whole time, and then he grins, puts his elbows on the table and leans forward. Peach grins back.

‘So hey,’ Ray says cheerfully. ‘I’m wondering why you didn’t tell us before that Stern’s girlfriend worked at the same coffee shop as Fryer.’

He feels Kowalski start beside him, the smallest muscle-shock of recognition, but nothing bigger than that, hopefully. Peach keeps grinning, but there’s something in his face, a flicker of something. And Ray knows he’s right.

‘You never asked,’ says Peach.

‘Hey Kowalski, you hear that? We never asked.’

Kowalski makes a small, incoherent noise.

‘I’m guessing she won’t be there now,’ Ray says.

Peach shakes his head. ‘I hear she’s cleared out.’

‘That all you hear?’

Peach shrugs. ‘I know her parents got money but they want her to work. That’s why she had the coffee job. Obviously she had a lot more money coming in than that which they had no idea about,’ he grins. ‘Getting a bit of a rep in Stern’s circles. Ruthless Tate. And I know how they met. He liked telling that story. See, she was out with her girlfriends at Stern’s favourite place, this nice little bar over on—’

‘Spare us the romcom stuff,’ Kowalski interrupts. ‘You know where we can find her or what?’

‘Well, um,’ he mutters, looking uncomfortable.

Ray leans in close to Kowalski’s ear, says to finish up, he’ll meet him outside. Then he goes up to the counter, gets the check and the sandwiches, stuffs a packet into each pocket. Kowalski joins him at the door, white and silent with anger, and shakes his head. They go out into the road, start back to the car.

They’re quiet a while. Then Kowalski says, ‘She was the girl we spoke to, right?’

‘Laura Tate. Yeah. Never trust a perfect witness.’

‘She kept that fucking _diary_ —’

‘I was looking at the girls behind the counter and suddenly I just knew, she wasn’t right. She wasn’t real.’

‘Hey, though,’ Kowalski says, laughing. ‘You really knocked Peach for six when you told him. That was something else.’

Ray grins to himself, a stupid little fizz of pleasure in his belly. ‘Thanks,’ he says dumbly. Then they lapse into silence, both of them sunk in thought, until they get back to the car.

Inside, Kowalski’s behind the wheel again, backs them out into slow morning traffic. Ray takes the sandwiches out of his pockets and throws one into Kowalski’s lap. Kowalski shakes his head. ‘Thanks, but I’m not hungry.’

‘Three coffees and no breakfast? Get hungry or you’re gonna put somebody’s head through a window.’

Kowalski laughs and then, when they’re idling at a red light, surprises Ray by doing as he’s told: he eats half the sandwich with one hand, leaves the rest wrapped up in the glove compartment. Still, a kind of victory.

They don’t have to talk for Ray to know exactly where they’re going. Fifteen minutes later, they pull up at the coffee shop where Fryer and Tate worked together. Of course, there’s no sign of her, just a queue of angry customers and one middle-aged woman serving alone, dyed blonde hair frizzing anxiously out of a messy bun. When they get to the front, Ray sees that she’s almost in tears.

‘Are you all right, ma’am?’

‘All my staff gone in a week,’ she says. Her name tag reads _GOOD MORNING I’M MARGARET!_ ‘It’s been just unbelievable – and—'

‘Ah, actually,’ Kowalski interrupts. ‘About that.’

Once she hears that they’re cops, that it’s to do with Mitch, she’s all too happy to put the sign on the door and shut up shop for five minutes, even though it’s their rush hour.

‘Mitch was a lovely kid,’ she says, using the quiet to wipe down the coffee machine with a cloth. There are plasters on her hands. Ray guesses she’s not too familiar with working it herself. ‘You sure I can’t get you boys anything?’

Kowalski meets Ray’s eyes for a moment, smiling with half his mouth. ‘Better not,’ he says. ‘But thanks.’

Margaret lets them look through the office paperwork for Laura Tate’s address, which Kowalski makes a note of; other than that, she doesn’t know what to tell them. She keeps saying Mitch was ‘a nice kid’ and Laura ‘a lovely girl’ and, when they tell her even a little of what they suspect, she’s almost too shocked to answer.

‘ _Drugs_?’ she says. ‘No, sorry officer, I don’t think so. Mitch and Laura?’

‘I’m afraid Laura’s become involved with quite a dangerous man.’

‘ _Laura_?’

‘When did she stop coming in to work for you?’

‘She gave notice a couple of days ago.’ Margaret’s lower lip wobbles. ‘She said she was sorry but – after Mitch – I mean they were so close—’

‘That’s all right,’ Kowalski interrupts, ‘now don’t upset yourself.’ With surprising gentleness he adds, ‘We’re gonna get to the bottom of this, okay?’

‘Okay,’ she says, dabbing at her eyes with a shirtsleeve.

‘But it’s very important that we get to speak to Laura sometime soon, to get all of this cleared up. So if you see her—’

‘I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.’

‘No, no. You tell _us_. Okay? If she comes by, keep her talking, slip out back, and give us a call on this number.’

‘But she—’

‘I’m sure you’re right, ma’am, that she’s a nice girl who’s got mixed up in something she doesn’t understand,’ Ray says. ‘But that kind of thing can make people nervous. So we don’t want her getting scared and running away and winding up in more trouble, do we?’

Margaret shakes her head. ‘Okay,’ she says slowly. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

Back at the car, Kowalski says, ‘We’re pretty sure, though, aren’t we, that she’s not a nice girl?’

Ray shrugs. ‘Not according to Peach. What did he call her?’

‘Ruthless.’

‘Ruthless Tate.’

‘Jeez, poor lady. What a dupe.’ He starts the car. They drive ten minutes to the address on Laura Tate’s paychecks, big-looking apartment in a nice area, way too nice for anyone earning minimum wage – but they don’t expect to find her there, and don’t. Nobody answers their knock, and when they look through the letterbox, the place is cleared out. Who knows how long ago she left.

They head back via a convenience store, where Ray buys a bag of apples, a small concession to their health. In the car, both of them shrug their jackets off and crack their windows, spring day starting to heat up. Ray eats two apples, one after another.

‘So, what,’ says Kowalski. ‘She gave it to us all the wrong way round? Her trying to sell to Fryer, rather than him selling to her.’

‘But Stern killed Fryer,’ Ray says, crunching. ‘I mean we still think that, right?’

‘But she killed Marcus. Hell, maybe she was part of what happened to Fryer, too. We know she got him in with Stern, maybe even had him take her out to make her boyfriend jealous…’

‘You know it was her who reported Fryer missing, don’t you? Tate. She called it in.’

‘Didn’t he have any other friends?’

‘They all said he got quiet after he dropped out of college, stopped returning their calls.’

‘And which came first? Stern and the girl, the drug stuff—’

‘If there was drug stuff. If this wasn’t just about her.’

‘If there was. Is that why he dropped out?’ Kowalski rubs his eyes, frowning. ‘Or did he pick it up after, at the coffee shop, needing money…’

‘When we spoke to her, she said Fryer started dealing because he couldn’t live on minimum wage, but maybe she was talking about herself. I mean she had three different income streams: the paycheck, the drug money, the parent money.’

‘Nice little nest egg.’

‘ _Very_ nice apartment.’

‘So let’s say her and Stern are the real deal, Bonnie and Clyde. The gang stuff’s okay but really the two of them are in it together. Right?’

‘I could see that.’

‘And Gordon Marcus is gonna testify against her boyfriend. So she puts a bullet in the back of his head, bam, no messing around. Because that’s gonna weaken our case against Stern, I guess--’

‘Or just for good old-fashioned revenge.’

Round and round and round it goes, turning it over and over between them, until Ray says, ‘We’ve just got to find her, that’s all. Everything will make sense once we’ve got her to talk.’ And then Kowalski grabs his arm so hard he can feel fingernails.

He says, ‘Stern’s,’ which is all Ray needs, because then, like they’re psychic, he knows. He just knows.

‘He’s her boyfriend. She’s got a key to his place.’

‘She thought nobody would go back there after we searched it once.’

‘So as far as she’s concerned it’s the safest place to be.’

They look at each other. Kowalski lets go of his arm, grabs the steering wheel. ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘hold on to your apples.’

Ray calls Frannie on the drive to check the address. He’s full of adrenalin, sugar, caffeine, the feeling that this is proper, instinctive policing, almost like working with Fraser.

They park round the corner, not wanting to risk tipping her off, and walk the two blocks in silence. Ray’s muscles are thrumming with the tension of it and he can tell Kowalski’s the same, they’re too close now to talk, they nearly have her. The front door to the building’s hanging off its hinges, so no need to buzz in, thank God. They climb the three flights and stand at the door waiting, and Ray knows Kowalski’s thinking the same thing as him. What’s the play?

After a moment, Ray raps on the door with his knuckle. He can feel Kowalski watching him. After a moment, he knocks again, then dials up his accent and calls, ‘ _Pi_ zza. Hey. Anybody in there order a pizza?’

He knocks again, making a real racket now, and he can see her in his head, pacing the floor, wondering whether to tell him to go away or what, and then they hear her voice.

‘I didn’t order anything,’ she says, ice-cold. ‘Go away.’

He and Kowalski look at each other. ‘Ma’am, I got the address right here on the form, okay? 55B.’

‘Well I didn’t order any--’

‘Well I ain’t going _no_ where til somebody _pays_ me for this _pizza_.’

The door swings open and she’s stood there, pinch-faced and furious, a good little actress, looking nothing like the sweet girl they interviewed at the coffee place last week. As soon as she sees them, the penny drops.

‘Hi,’ says Kowalski.

She slams the door hard, but Kowalski’s faster, bounces off it with his shoulder, after her in a second. She’s fast too, throwing the next door shut too as she dives into the living room. They apprehend her halfway out the window, trying to get down the fire escape, Kowalski basically picks her up and drags her back into the room, kicking and screaming. She lands one pretty hard in his shin before they manage to get her on the floor and cuffed.

Ray reads her her rights. Kowalski sits on the floor, head tipped back against the wall, and watches, breathing. Ray can feel Kowalski’s eyes on him but it doesn’t bother him like it used to. When he’s done, he looks up, and grins.

Kowalski grins back.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘ _Now_ I’m hungry.’

  


+

They’re drinking after-dinner coffee, and Stella’s watching him from under her eyelids, a little drunk, which on a woman as held-together as she is just sort of looks flirtatious. And maybe Ray’s drunk as well, because it’s dinner at her place and they’ve been pretty free and easy with the wine, Stella had a bad week at work and needed to relax, and the way she tells court stories is just so _funny_. But now there’s something blurry in the movement of his hand to the cup, her face, her laugh, and he says, ‘Hey, is there something in this coffee?’

Stella laughs. ‘I asked did you want it Irish and you said yes!’

He’d kind of hoped this would sober him up, but that doesn’t seem likely now. They’re both laughing. ‘You working women really can put it away,’ he says, kind of impressed, and it’s how she’s looking at him, the way she’s looking at him, it’s making him feel out of his mind.

‘So you don’t want a nightcap, is that it?’

But he does, of course. So she pours them both a whisky, puts a record on and they sit on her couch, something blurry about all of it, beautifully so; the way she’s stroking his leg, her hand on his thigh. _Play it cool, Vecchio, play it cool_.

It’s been a while since – anything. In Vegas, it wasn’t really safe to let his guard down. Langoustini liked working girls, so Ray had to have them up to his room sometimes, but that’s not his thing; he’d put a movie on, have a glass of wine with them, let them think whatever they thought, probably that he was gay and covering, which was fine, better that than the other, and boy he hopes he hasn’t said any of that out loud to Stella.

She’s laughing at him but he doesn’t think it’s about that and, oh, she’s noticed what the hand on his leg thing is doing, what she’s doing to him, which is fine, and now she’s kissing him which is great – and her hair, the smell of her hair – and then it’s – he has the front of her dress down, palming her breasts, his mouth on her neck and – _don’t think about it_ – he’s between her legs with her dress hiked up, her hips fit in the palms of his hands like they were made for it, but – _don’t think about it_ – but he can’t help it, he’s kind of buzzed, mind spinning out of control and that image from the other night is back in his head, Kowalski and Stella together, his shoulders moving on top of her, his fingers where Ray’s are, inside her, her gasping his name, ‘Ray – Ray—’ He wonders which of them she’s asking for. And then her hand is on him and it’s him, obviously he’s him and she’s herself and they’re alone, but he can still see it in his mind just as clear as if it was a memory, her holding Kowalski’s dick like this, her mouth, and him – gasping, his hand in her hair – and Ray comes hard, strangled noise in the back of his throat and white behind his eyes.

They lie back on the couch a while, holding their drinks. She has her face pressed into his neck, still half undressed. ‘That was fun,’ she whispers.

‘Yeah,’ he says, grinning, ‘you should have a bad week at work more often.’ But the sweat on the back of his neck is cold.

  


+

They’re working late tonight, checking over everything they’ve got on Laura Tate. She has no alibi for the night Marcus was killed, lied to them about how she knew Fryer, and was caught hiding out in Stern’s apartment, so it’s looking pretty bad for her – but all the same, it’s circumstantial. A good lawyer could make most of it go away, and her parents have money, lots of it, meaning Tate will get a _very_ good lawyer. So the two of them are digging to see if there’s anything else they can find before she and Stern go to trial.

It’s a Wednesday, but somebody’s birthday; people started drifting to the bar as early as it was vaguely decent, and now the bullpen’s half empty. Really, they could spread out, use different desks, but for whatever reason, they haven’t, papers all crammed into one little space. Frannie stops by on her way out and says, ‘Oh come _on_ ,’ plaintive.

Ray waves her off. ‘This is policework, Frannie, you ever hear of that?’

She sticks her tongue out at them as she goes. But when they’re alone, Ray says, ‘This doesn’t have to be a two-man job, you know. If you want to go for a drink with everyone, I don’t mind.’

Kowalski grins. ‘Thanks, but those things are kind of intense.’

‘Well they are if you dance like that, whirling every woman round the bar like a hammer throw.’

Kowalski laughs and covers his face with one hand. ‘Uhuh,’ he says. ‘I been waiting for the other shoe to drop on that one.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Laugh it up, Vecchio. Women like a man who can dance.’

Ray raises his eyebrows and says, ‘Is that what that was? _Dancing_ , I oughta write that down.’ And suddenly he’s not enjoying this conversation anymore. He can rationalise things however he likes, but it doesn’t feel good to sit here with Kowalski like two buddies when Stella – when he and Stella—

Weird. Bad-weird.

He sticks his head in his reading and tries to forget everything but work, doesn’t look up again for an hour or so. When he does, it’s dark outside. Must be, what, seven? Later? Kowalski’s got his arms on the table and his head on his arms.

Ray laughs. ‘Keeping you up?’ he says.

Kowalski lifts his head, blinks bloodshot eyes. ‘Sorry,’ he says, smiling. ‘Not been sleeping too good. I’m fine.’

Ray rolls his eyes. ‘Sleep nothing, your problem is you don’t eat enough.’ There’s a pause where his ears catch up with his mouth. ‘My god, did you hear that? My mother was just in here, where’d she go?’

Kowalski laughs. ‘You’re joking, but that really was uncanny.’

‘I forgot you met her.’

‘Oh I met pretty much all of them. The whole Vecchio gang.’

‘Well I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘No, no,’ Kowalski shakes his head, suddenly serious. ‘I liked them. They were nice to me, and they didn’t have to be.’

Ray waves a hand, ‘Ah, Ma’s always looking for another mouth to feed,’ but secretly he’s sort of touched. It occurs to him, perhaps for the first time, that he got lucky with Kowalski. Ray’s proud of what he does but there’s no denying there’s a lot of two-bit, dirty cops out there, people who don’t care one jot for the honour of it, any one of whom could have blown through his life like it didn’t matter, ruined his name, his reputation – and instead he got Kowalski. Bringing his mother flowers. Looking after the Mountie. Ray owes him.

‘What?’ says Kowalski. He’s sort of blushing, like he’s psychic, knows what Ray was thinking, and meanwhile Ray’s just sat here looking at him like a moron.

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I was thinking.’

‘About?’

‘Uh. Well. About take-out. What do you want to eat? And don’t say you’re not hungry, because so help me God I am my mother’s son, you know what I can do to you.’

They work until the food comes, then sit with their feet up on the desk in the evening light of the bullpen, skeleton staff passing through every now and then, and eat, and talk about nothing. Work, old cases, the city. Places they knew as kids, looking for crossover, and how it’s changed, how it goes on changing. How weird it is to work with someone local, after Fraser.

When they lapse into silence, Kowalski puts his chow mein aside, unfinished, and wipes his fingers on a napkin. He looks kind of serious. ‘So, guess what came today?’ he says.

For a moment Ray thinks this must be something to do with the Mountie, because that’s what they were talking about. The address of his new posting, a number where they can reach him, he doesn’t know, but he doesn’t like the thought of Kowalski knowing and not telling him, of not being the person Fraser would call first. And these thoughts get so knotted up in his head that he says nothing, just watches Kowalski take out his badge and slide it over. Ray puts his fork down, picks up the badge. And there it is, in black and white: _Stanley_ _Raymond Kowalski_.

‘I guess somebody up top finally noticed you were back,’ Kowalski says.

‘Well, there you go,’ Ray fumbles, still on the back foot. ‘Hey, you’ve got your life back, what are you gonna do with it?’ He’s joking obviously, and Kowalski laughs, but he doesn’t answer. Ray feels kind of weird.

Because that’s it, right? Kowalski can go back to wherever, get his old job back, Ray can get at least half this crap off his desk, and Stella – he can see where things go with Stella without having to worry about spending all day every day kicking down doors with her ex-husband. Without having to lie. He can stop being one half of a whole, start figuring out which bits of his life are his and which are Kowalski’s, and how they divide them up.

Which should be a relief. But somehow it doesn’t feel like that. And probably that’s about Benny.

Fraser’s not dead, obviously – but he’s way way off in the Yukon, which is _like_ being dead. And like this, working with Kowalski, Ray gets to keep a little piece of his friend with him all the time. He gets to tell stories to somebody who rolls his eyes and laughs and gets it. Obviously that’s not something they’ve really done much of, not yet, but Ray knows he _could_ , if he wanted to.

And they’re good together. Maybe it’s not magic – there were days where he felt like he and Fraser practically could read each other’s minds, probably nothing will be like that for him ever again, that kind of thing’s once in a lifetime – but he and Kowalski, they’re – good. They make each other better cops, Ray thinks, than either of them would be alone.

And it’s not the same as working with the Mountie, but how many superheroes do you find just walking around down here in Chicago? Not many. Less, now. There’s a lot of crappy cops out there, and Kowalski, he trusts.

Ray tries to compose his face. ‘That’s great,’ he says, ‘real great. So, are you – is the plan--’

‘I spoke to Welsh,’ Kowalski interrupts. ‘He said, if I want to, I can stay here.’

‘Here?’

‘My old desk’s gone. I mean, they weren’t keeping it warm for me, I gave them a call and they said they’re full. So Welsh—’

‘So if you stay here – would we—’

Kowalski’s neck is bright red. ‘Uh,’ he says, looking away, tugs on his collar, and Ray feels a sudden urge to – do something. Touch him. Give him a little smack on the arm or something, the way he’s seen other cops do with their partner, roughhousing, except it’s kind of a weird thing to think and now he’s been thinking about it way too long to actually do it. His fingers itch. It’s working with Fraser, probably, the guy’s like a block of ice, Ray doesn’t know how to act normal anymore.

‘Well, only if you want to,’ Kowalski mutters.

‘I want to.’

‘You do?’

‘Yeah, I do, you bet I do. Do you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I mean, we got a good thing going, right?’

‘Yeah,’ says Kowalski, grinning like nobody’s ever said a kind word to him in his life before now, which Ray just knows isn’t true. ‘Yeah, you know, I think so. I do.’

  


+

That night, Ray dreams about dancing. In the dream, he’s at some _olde worlde_ English ball, like in a movie, everyone wearing big dresses and cravats and stuff, swapping partners, twirling each other round by the arm. He’s trying to get to Stella. He can see her at the other end of the dance floor, makes his way towards her via one faceless lady after another, dipping them, twirling them, moving with dreamlike ease as, slowly but surely, he gets closer.

Then finally he’s next to her, and takes her hand. Only, when he looks up, it’s Fraser’s hand he’s holding.

‘Oh my!’ says Fraser. ‘What a mix-up!’

‘Hey Kowalski, get your mitts off,’ somebody says, and Ray looks round to see that it’s Kowalski, which is all wrong, of course. Ray wants to explain, the words are on the tip of his tongue, _you’ve got it all wrong,_ _I’m Ray Vecchio_ , but then he feels a gun pressing into the back of his neck, just at the top of his spine. He wakes up with a start, covered in sweat.

Ray rolls over in bed, heart beating like he’s run up two flights of stairs. For some reason, when he first went undercover, that had been the image in his mind of how he would die. Getting found out, feeling the gun there at the base of his skull with just enough time to think _oh shit_ before: boom, done, struck out.

He sits up in bed and hits the light. It’s three in the morning. There’s a furry, hangover-taste on his tongue and a glass of water on the bedside table. He drains the glass in one.

His mind runs through images from the night before like somebody checking off a list: a blue-lit bar, shots, loud music. Kowalski laughing, his face in the half-darkness. The panic of the dream is still in Ray’s body as he thinks: what did I do? What happened? But the checklist runs through without hitting anything abnormal. They finished up on the Tate case, grabbed a drink or two on the way home, maybe one too many, a little informal celebration. They just – drank, chatted. Everything’s fine.

Ray switches the light back off, turns over his pillow and lays his face on the cool side, feeling his heart rate settle, slowing down to normal.

And as he lies there in the dark, with the last vestiges of fear in his body, he thinks: _What do you mean, what did I do? What do you think you did?_

  


+

They get back to the bullpen just before lunchtime, tired from a morning of depressing conversations, visiting the witnesses of a drive-by shooting in broad daylight, middle of the afternoon. Nobody’s in custody for it yet and Ray doesn’t feel any closer to getting anyone than he did before they went out. But Frannie’s bursting with good news. ‘I got two great things to tell you about,’ she says, bustling round them like a pigeon as they traipse back in.

The first, it transpires, is that Welsh has conjured up a spare desk, had Frannie come in early and move the furniture around. Ray tries to look delighted about it, but ridiculously, now that he’s getting his space back, he doesn’t want it. He hasn’t had a desk all to himself in, what, three years? Nearly four?

‘Why the long face?’ says Kowalski, picking up armfuls of folders. ‘You gonna miss me?’

Ray laughs. ‘Well, maybe.’

Kowalski laughs too. Arms full, he gestures with his head. ‘Well if you need me, I’ll be over there.’

Ray turns to Frannie, still hovering at his shoulder, looking like one of those singing birds in _Snow White_. ‘What’s the other thing?’ he says.

She’s practically vibrating as she hands him over a bit of paper and whispers, ‘ _Fraser called_. He got his new posting at last, he’s all set up, and that’s the number.’

Ray stares at the piece of paper for a second. Except maybe more than a second, because there’s a kind of buzzing in his ears and Frannie saying, ‘Ray? _Ray_?’

He blinks at her. ‘Sorry. Bad morning. Hey, that’s great.’

It hadn’t been _that_ bad. He’s had plenty worse. Frannie drifts back to work and leaves Ray sat at his desk, alone, trying to make himself act like a normal person. He opens a case file, puts the scrap of paper down on top, flattens it with his palm.

No message? Hard to say with Frannie. Fraser could’ve read her a whole list out and if none of it was to do with how much he missed her, she’d have forgotten it all. Ray looks over at Kowalski, dragging things this way and that on his desk, trying to make it look like ordered mess, the right kind of chaos. And then he smiles to himself because it’s kind of funny that he knows that.

Is he going crazy, or did Frannie wait til he was on his own to tell him about Fraser? Did Fraser _ask_ her to keep it from Kowalski? Suddenly Ray remembers what she said about Canada. Maybe they really did have a fight up there. Or who knows. Maybe, when all was said and done, the two of them just weren’t that close.

Ray pushes his chair back, legs screeching, and goes out into the corridor. It’s loud today, but in a good, anonymous way. He shoves two dollars’ worth of quarters in the payphone and dials the number. There’s a funny sound, like it’s trying to connect. Ray remembers the last time he called Fraser up there, how he had to climb a telephone pole to answer, maybe this will be like that. Then he feels a wrench of something like shame and hangs up.

All he’s wanted in the world, for weeks and weeks, has been to talk to Fraser – but suddenly he feels like he can’t do it, not yet. Because he’s a piece of shit.

Taking Stella out, not telling Kowalski; spending day after day working with the guy and not telling her about it either; nothing the Mountie can say is going to absolve him. And now it’s like he doesn’t want to talk to Fraser with the stench of it on him. He wants it done, finished, over.

The quarters come rolling back out and Ray pockets them. And part of him says, that woman is amazing, what are you doing? You march in there right now and tell Kowalski he’s got to find another guy to work with.

But the other, bigger part of him knows he won’t do that. Maybe he’s crazy, choosing this guy with the scruffy clothes and the fidgeting and the hang-dog face, this seventh-grade-pen-chewer who looks at Ray like a lost fucking dog, over the woman of, let’s be honest, any sane man’s dreams. But Kowalski’s a good guy and he’s put up with a lot of Ray’s shit for no real reason. He’s been there when Ray felt like half a person, half a puzzle. And they’re partners. Ray said yes. That means better or worse.

There’s a weird, unnameable feeling in his chest, like at least if he’s making a mistake, he’s making a decision; it feels kind of like terror, kind of like resolve, and almost, a little bit, like pride.

‘Okay Fraser,’ he mutters. ‘You win this round.’

He tucks the piece of paper away in his pocket. Then he calls Stella.

+

‘So it was kind of an accident,’ he says. They’re walking round a scrubby patch of green between their offices that passes for a park, because Ray felt that if they went to either of their places, he might lose his resolve. It’s a beautiful afternoon, clear-skied and lovely, and Stella looks amazing, and he is an idiot.

‘It wasn’t like I wasn’t telling you about it,’ he goes on, ‘but obviously I wasn’t – telling you about it – but I didn’t mean to keep it from you, it all just happened. And there it is, we’re working together now, and that’s just how it’s got to be I’m afraid.’

Stella muffles a laugh. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘It just – sounded like you were breaking things off, the way you said that.’

Ray blinks. ‘Well,’ he says slowly. ‘Well, I thought – you’d find it too weird.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I – because we’re – I mean I’d be talking about him to you, you to him, I thought you—’

‘Listen, Ray.’ She stops. There’s a spray of new green leaves in the trees behind her, making her hair look lighter and brighter, and she’s got that face on, that you’re-a-fucking-idiot-but-for-some-reason-I-like-you face that he enjoys so much. ‘Obviously,’ she says, ‘ _you_ find it weird. Which is fine! And if you did want to break things off, I’d understand. But don’t make that decision on my account, because I really don’t think it’s that big of a deal.’

‘Right,’ says Ray. He’s so surprised, he can’t even tell if he’s pleased.

Stella starts walking again and he goes with her. ‘Is he a nightmare to work with?’ she asks cheerfully.

‘Uh, not – not really. He’s been very, actually, very patient.’

‘With you?’

‘I’ve had some minor, uh – please don’t repeat this in a court one day, but – judgement lapses. Nothing big, nothing that’s affected any cases, but I’ve been, not always, since Vegas, the best at thinking things through. And Kowalski, he’s actually been very nice about it.’

Stella touches his arm. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Ray looks across at her: brow furrowed kindly, hand on his shoulder. She’s right of course. Why didn’t he? Because he was ashamed? Because it was all bound up with Kowalski, deciding to see her, anger? Both, perhaps. He shrugs. ‘Oh I’m fine now. Good as new.’

‘Well I’m glad to hear he’s been – kind to you.’

‘He has. Very kind.’

‘And what does he think about all this?’

‘You and me?’

She nods.

‘Well,’ Ray says. ‘I haven’t uh – that is, I decided to talk to you first.’

‘Well look, the way I see it, it’s a small world – especially in our jobs, in this city. If he doesn’t mind, I don’t.’

Ray laughs weakly. Kowalski’s only mentioned Stella once or twice and obviously Ray’s changed the subject as quickly as possible, but there was no mistaking that light in his eyes. You never really get over your first love. He should be happy, relieved, that she’s so unruffled, but he isn’t. Because now he has no excuse. He has to tell Kowalski. The guy might put his head through a window, but somehow that’s nothing on the fear that he’ll be – hurt. Betrayed.

‘Yeah,’ Ray says. ‘Well I’ll let you know. Thanks, Stell.’ When he leans down to kiss her, she draws him into her arms for a moment. Then he goes back to work.

Ray spends the whole walk back wondering how the hell he’s going to bring all this up with Kowalski, but in the end, as luck would have it – if you’d call it luck – he doesn’t need to. Back at the bullpen, he stops off at Kowalski’s desk to grab some notes, and straight away he stops what he’s doing, leans back and starts sniffing the air. He looks like Diefenbaker. Ray’s on the verge of making some kind of joke when Kowalski says, ‘Somebody smells like my ex-wife.’

Ray’s mouth just about falls open. He can hear the sound his teeth make as he clicks his jaw shut. His pulse is in his ears. ‘About that,’ he says. ‘I actually, I saw her just now.’

Kowalski raises his eyebrows. ‘Is Stella here? Is she on the Tate trial?’

‘No, she uh – hey can we go out in the hall?’

‘In the hall?’

‘Or in the – can we – just for five minutes?’

In the end, unable to find anywhere private, and not wanting to prolong the tense, expectant silence any longer, Ray bundles Kowalski into a stationery cupboard. He remembers having a fight with Fraser in here once. Was it a fight? Something, some tricky conversation. What he’d give to be as impassive as the Mountie right now instead of what he is, which is terrified, with sweaty palms.

‘So when you were up in Canada,’ he says, talking way too fast, ‘I met Stella, by chance. We got chatting. And I took her out. Before we really knew each other – you and me, I mean, obviously it was before we – before me and – anyway, what I mean is—’

‘Vecchio, are—’

‘I’m saying we’re seeing each other. Me and Stella. And I thought it wouldn’t matter because I thought – but anyway she said, she doesn’t mind if you don’t, so I wanted to just, I thought I had to – tell you. So there it is.’

Ray doesn’t know what he was expecting. No, he does. He was expecting Kowalski to lay one on him, trying to hold his jaw nice and loose while he told him, and he wouldn’t have blamed the guy either. But Kowalski’s just looking at him wide-eyed, saying nothing. People who’ve been shot look like that sometimes; no fear, no anger, just shock.

‘Kowalski, talk to me.’

‘My Stella?’

‘Your – well—’ Caught between admission – yes, your Stella – and the right to state his own claim, Ray nearly says, _Well, ours_. Which would be insane. For a moment he remembers that strange drunken night at hers, the image in his mind, the two of them together, Jesus, is that part of this? Some frisson, some desire to steal Kowalski’s girl, some – something. But of course not, he met Stella before he really knew the guy – except for the surname of course, so at some level he must have—

And suddenly Kowalski seems to spring to life. He slaps Ray hard on the arm. ‘Right,’ he says loudly. ‘Well, glad that’s all sorted.’ And he bundles out of the closet and back towards the bullpen before Ray can point out that nothing’s been resolved at all.

Ray stands in the hall, watches Kowalski’s retreating back, feeling like some combination of a lunatic, a heel and a pervert, and it’s all he can do to stop himself chasing Kowalski down and apologising. What would he offer? Would he promise not to see her again? In that moment, he feels so desperate that he thinks maybe, if that was the condition, he would.

‘You’re a shmuck, Vecchio,’ he mutters.

  


+

The silence in the car’s so thick, you could cut it with a knife. They’re in the GTO, staking out some old warehouse near the lake where a bunch of arms smugglers may or may not be awaiting a large shipment. More likely not – another pair of detectives have done the leg work, found two possible locations and stationed themselves at the other, which for whatever reason seems more plausible. So the two of them are here as a _just in case_. It should be a nice evening, one with very little chance of action, being paid extra time to sit round eating, talking and listening to the radio. But of course, today it’s a nightmare.

Kowalski hasn’t said a word to him beyond the absolutely necessary since the afternoon. He’s not giving him the silent treatment – he’s answered all Ray’s questions politely enough – but other than that he’s been quiet, spaced out, far away. Ray feels like he’s on hold. He’s spent their two hour-wait counting seconds, fiddling with the radio, saying not very much – until they hear it. A truck pulling up in the forecourt, over by the far building.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Ray mutters. It wasn’t supposed to be them, it wasn’t supposed to be here.

‘Our lucky night,’ Kowalski mutters. It’s the most cordial thing he’s said all evening.

They’re parked at the far end of the forecourt, but if these guys spot the car, it had better be empty. Kowalski picks up the radio and calls it in, then Ray says, ‘Come on,’ and they both get out, shutting the doors as quietly as possible, moving in darkness to the back of the nearest building. They lean against the wall there and watch the men unload the truck, with their guns drawn, just in case.

‘If only there were more of us, we could go in now, get the drivers, too,’ Ray says.

‘Well that would be great, Vecchio. I’ll write that down – next time we get surprised by somebody else’s stupid plan, we oughta do it with back-up.’

That shuts Ray up.

It’s only been a couple of minutes since they radioed, all likelihood it’ll be another ten before anyone else gets here. There are three guys in the truck, four in the building, and only two of them. Obviously they have to wait until the shipment’s unloaded, let some of them leave before they go in, or until the cavalry arrives, whatever comes first.

Of course, if Fraser was here, they’d go now – but that would be stupid. There’s something funny about the way Kowalski’s watching them though, like he’s thinking the same thing. Then he says, voice hard and angry, ‘Fuck it. Come on.’

Before Ray can stop him, he’s out on the forecourt in the half-light, headed straight for them. Ray hears, ‘All right, Chicago PD, everybody on the ground,’ and this is a dumb play, absolutely wrong, but what else can he do? He follows.

For a moment, all seven arms dealers just stand there, looking dumbstruck. Ray’s covering the guys with the boxes, Kowalski the other three, nearer the truck. Maybe they’re too surprised to do anything but surrender? Maybe it’s fine.

‘Didn’t you hear me? I said get on the ground,’ Kowalski shouts. Then one of the men starts laughing and a bullet pings out of nowhere.

One guy still in the warehouse. Not seven. Eight.

They run, both of them, to the other side of the truck, the steady _ping, ping_ of bullets from a silenced muzzle hitting its metal sides. Ray’s too angry to speak and Kowalski looks angry too, like this was somebody else’s dumb idea, but there’s no time to get annoyed about that now. Ray peers round the frontage, gets off a couple of good shots and one of the truck guys goes down. Kowalski’s wearing his glasses, which is something.

‘We can’t stay here, we’re sitting ducks,’ Kowalski says. ‘I’ll cover you. Head for the far building, that one.’ He nods towards it with his head. And before Ray can say anything else, Kowalski’s emptying his clip and Ray, fuck it, runs, nothing else to do. A bullet whizzes by so close that for a moment he thinks he’s hit, though of course, you never hear the one that gets you, or, wait, is that bombs? Whatever, he gets to the other side in one piece and gives Kowalski the same cover. Though now they’re expecting it.

Ray hears Kowalski shout, just before he reaches the building, sees him stumble. But he makes it.

‘Are you okay?’ Ray shouts. He can’t turn and look yet, too busy returning fire. He gets off another lucky shot – six against two, almost do-able – but still Kowalski’s saying nothing. Ray senses rather than sees him slide down the brick wall and land on the floor, breathing hard, and Ray’s so angry and frightened that he nearly kicks him. ‘I said are you _okay_ ,’ he shouts.

‘Yeah.’ Kowalski’s voice is ragged. ‘Got me. Not badly. I’m fine, come on.’

Ray feels a hand on the back of his collar. The warehouse is dark inside, musty-smelling, but empty. There’s a set of stairs up to a second floor, which they take, Kowalski limping, dragging Ray along with a hand fisted in his jacket like he’s the injured one.

Now that Kowalski’s actually hurt, Ray should feel worse, guiltier, but somehow it’s just made him furious. ‘This is dumb, dumb, _dumb_ ,’ he spits, as they head over to the upstairs windows. They need to pick off one, maybe two more of these guys before they come up here, trap them and kill them like fucking rats.

Kowalski, dead-eye in his glasses, gets one in the knee and he goes down like a sack of beans. Five now. And somebody’s in the truck, behind the wheel, driving out and away, so – four. Just four coming into the warehouse after them. Okay.

‘We can’t stay here. Too many. Once they know where we are they’ll just—’

‘Oh great, what do you suggest?’

‘Roof?’ says Kowalski with a shrug.

‘You’ve been shot in the leg, wiseass.’

‘It’s a _graze_.’

The men are inside now, on the floor below. Ray gives up on the windows and, eyes adjusting to the dark, scans the floor they’re on. There’s a door nearby leading out into nothing – must’ve been for unloading from something high up, Christ knows. Anyway, looks like they’re taking the door into thin air.

‘Roof it is,’ he says. They make it outside, onto the ledge just in time, Ray swinging the door shut behind them as a bullet pings off it.

‘Remind me again why this was a good idea?’ he says. Kowalski’s gray in the face, thin-lipped and bleeding and suddenly Ray feels awful, because this is all his fault.

‘Oh god, _Kowalski_ ,’ he says. A bullet pings off the other side of the wall close-by. The men are inside, they know where the two of them are, and they’re shooting at the wall between them. This cannot end well.

‘We gotta move okay? They know we’re here.’

Kowalski, grim-faced, nods. They edge their way around the ledge, gripping the brickwork. They move slowly, Ray keeping his gun trained on the door the whole way. Eventually, one of them’s dumb enough to stick his head out, and Ray gets him in the shoulder. They make it round the corner. Ladder. Fire escape. Praise be.

‘Up or down?’ Kowalski says. Then his bad leg gives. For a second Ray thinks he’s gonna fall, grabs him hard around the middle. He can feel Kowalski’s breath on his face. Then a bullet rips through the window a foot away from them. Only a lucky guess, but still, not the best news ever.

‘Either, but do it fast. Can you make it okay?’

Kowalski nods and starts down, climbing well despite his injury. Ray goes after him, palms sweating, nearly losing his grip on the metal more than once. Then, just as they’re at the bottom, they hear it – sirens. Two squad cars in the forecourt, maybe three.

‘We’ve got to—’ Kowalski starts, but Ray pushes him hard against the wall to keep him there.

‘You nothing,’ he says. ‘ _I’ve_ got to. You stay put and try not to bleed to death, okay?’

They’re both panting from the chase and the climb, Kowalski’s head tipped back against the wall, eyes half-closed. ‘It’s a _graze_ ,’ he says again, but he looks like a piece of shit.

‘ _Stay_ ,’ Ray commands, as you would a dog, then lets go of him, heads back to the forecourt. There are plenty of officers, some already seeing to the injured men left out in the yard.

Ray finds the guy who looks in charge and introduces himself. ‘Four hostiles inside, one injured. One injured officer round back.’

‘Thanks. We’ve already radioed for ambulances. Is your guy okay?’

Ray thinks about it. ‘Angry,’ he says. ‘But he’ll be fine.’

Within five minutes, the men inside the warehouse are being led out, cuffed, and nobody is dead. Ray’s adrenalized terror already feels like being brilliantly drunk. He goes back to fetch Kowalski, triumphant, finds him still leaning against the wall, eyes closed.

‘Hey,’ Ray says happily, drawing level.

Kowalski opens his eyes. Then he punches Ray right in the face. Ray staggers, hand over his mouth. What a right hook! He should’ve remembered the jaw thing, to keep it nice and loose around Kowalski for, oh, at least another six weeks.

‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Kowalski spits.

‘I mean,’ Ray gestures vaguely, ‘I could ask you the same,’ but actually he feels relieved. At least if Kowalski will admit he’s angry, that’s somewhere to work from. Better than another mess like this.

‘My _wife_ , Vecchio. My wife. All the women in the world and you had to go after her?’

‘I didn’t go _after_ her, Kowalski it just – Look, I know, it’s insane, but I swear to you, it wasn’t – I mean, I didn’t even _know_ you then--’

‘Isn’t all of this fucked up enough?’

‘Kowalski—’

‘You’re the real you and I’m the fake you, and _Fraser_ , all of that, and now you’re dating my _wife_ \--’

‘Ex-wife!’

‘Oh like that matters.’

‘Of course it matters, Kowalski, you’re _divorced_ ,’ Ray could practically shake him now and maybe he will, why not, hands in the lapels of Kowalski’s leather jacket, saying, ‘I know it’s hard, I’ve been there, but you’ve got to let go, move on,’ just a string of meaningless words spilling out. Is he angry again? He is, at least he thinks he is, but he’s not sure exactly what about. Take your pick.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Kowalski shouts. ‘Move on, sure, but she don’t gotta move on with you, Ray Vecchio, that ain’t fair.’ He’s turned them, holding Ray up against the wall, and for a moment Ray thinks they’re going to have a fight, a real one, some stupid schoolboy struggle; Kowalski’s hands are fisted in his shirt and his face, white with fury, only inches away, so that for one hysterical moment Ray thinks Kowalski’s going to headbutt him, or bite him on the nose or something. Just like that, he can see all this from the outside and it looks absurd.

‘Okay, truce, come on,’ he shouts, almost hysterical.

Kowalski shoves him, steps away. Then he wobbles on his bad leg, nearly goes over and Ray, unthinking, reaches out to steady him, holding him up.

Suddenly, Kowalski’s arms are round Ray’s back, a bearhug, the strangest mix of violence and tenderness Ray’s ever known. But he’s so relieved he could cry. He thinks he might be shaking, all the adrenalin of the shoot-out leaving his body, but if Kowalski notices, he doesn’t say anything.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ray says quietly, and he is. ‘I’m sorry, please Kowalski, I’m so sorry.’

  


+

‘And what about your dreams?’ says Barratt.

Ray blinks. What does he know? ‘Excuse me?’

‘Lots of people who’ve been undercover long-term, in the way that you were, suffer from disturbing dreams for some time afterwards. Anxiety dreams, nightmares, that sort of thing. Anything like that?’

Ray’s been having weird dreams ever since the night he and Stella fooled around on her couch. Not about Langoustini though. He laughs awkwardly.

‘What is it, Detective Vecchio?’

‘Nothing, sorry. I just have some, uh, personal stuff going on at the moment,’ Ray laughs again, embarrassed, trying to make small of it. His jaw still hurts from where Kowalski landed one on him at the warehouse. ‘I just thought, you know, what I wouldn’t give for some good old-fashioned nightmares about the mafia.’

It’s not like there’s been loads of dreams, it isn’t an epidemic. One or two, perhaps three. One about dancing, maybe he should tell Barratt about it, at least it ended the same way as his old mob nightmares, back in Vegas. They were worst the first three or four months of his posting. He used to wake up not knowing where he was, sweating practically out of his ears, and have to compose himself as quick as possible because Langoustini, he wasn’t scared of a thing.

There’s been a couple of other dreams too. One with him in an audience watching Stella and Kowalski up on a stage, doing – stuff that wouldn’t be so appropriate to do up there. Another, almost funny, where he was in bed with Stella and then looked up partway through to she’d turned into somebody else. Well. Into Kowalski. But dreams are weird, Ray’s always had odd dreams, they don’t mean anything. These are only stress, guilt; the important thing is not to get all funny about them, act like they’re a big deal. Things are strange enough with him and Kowalski as it is.

It’s been two days since the warehouse, Kowalski blowing hot and cold the whole time since. One moment he’s distant, borderline rude, and then the next, these odd moments of gentleness. Like this morning, standing behind Ray’s desk to ask a question, and Kowalski laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. Or at lunch when Kowalski saw Ray putting sugar in his coffee, and they’d looked at each other, Kowalski smiling this small, strange smile, oddly private.

Then the next moment he’ll be freezing cold again. It’s felt sometimes like these last couple of months have been only a hallucination, all this time they’ve been no more than two colleagues, instead of – well, whatever Ray would have said they were last week. Friends, maybe, but somehow the word doesn’t seem enough, because he’s had plenty of friendships in his life and those were easy. With Kowalski it was more like sharing half a life with somebody. The moments where he acts like they’re strangers to one another are so much worse than him being angry.

Barratt coughs politely, drawing Ray’s attention back. ‘Sorry,’ says Ray.

‘Is something playing on your mind, detective?’

Yes, Ray thinks, of course. But there’s no way he can talk about it here. ‘Thanks. I’m fine.’

‘If you’re sure,’ says Barratt, inclining his head in that odd, Fraser-like way he has, and oh god, that’s another thing, Ray still hasn’t called him back, Fraser. What would he say? How would he explain the mess of everything? Better not to risk the conversation yet. He hasn’t called Stella either. She left a message on his machine yesterday, asking if he wants to go out some place Saturday night, and the crazy thing is, he doesn’t know if he _does_ want to. He just feels so damn guilty. And if he doesn’t, fine, but then he should be a grown-up, call her up, give it to her straight. She’ll understand. A woman like that, she must have plenty of offers, right?

Still, that’s being a cop. You deal with the problem that’s in front of you, focus on that, sometimes that’s all you can do. And right now, Ray’s problem is definitely Kowalski.

  


+

It’s an early heatwave, first of the year, and the bullpen’s in chaos. Ray’s never understood why crime rates go up in hot weather, but without fail, every single year, they do. He’s already unsettled when Kowalski stops by his desk, looking kind of shifty, and Ray feels a little buzz of panic, of _what now?_

‘So I’ve arranged for us to pay Elias Stern a visit in jail. If that’s okay with you.’

Ray blinks. ‘When?’

‘Today.’

‘Why? I mean, fine, but why?’

Kowalski stands there, worrying at his bottom lip. Has he lost weight? More to the point, why has Ray come over all mother-hen lately, why has he even _noticed_ that? ‘Kowalski?’

‘Isn’t it still bothering you? Don’t you feel like there’s something we’re missing?’

Maybe there is. Ray’s mind hasn’t been so much on the job lately. Hey, maybe it _should_ be bothering him. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘What time?’

They drive out just after two in the afternoon, get through security fast enough, Kowalski unhooking his holster from his shoulders like a cowboy, leaving it at the gate. When Ray first met him he thought that shoulder holster thing was kind of an affectation. Now he looks naked without it. Not naked, but. Anyway.

Soon they’re sitting opposite Stern, other side of a piece of glass. He looks at them with hatred in his eyes, which, given the last time they saw each other Kowalski had just shot him in the leg, is probably unsurprising. ‘You,’ says Stern.

‘Us,’ Kowalski says cheerfully. Ray hopes they find something, that they’ve come here for a reason, not a bad excuse for Kowalski to work out some of his anger on an easy target. Because Ray’s pretty sure Kowalski’s still angry. What else can explain the coldness, how chatty he was over lunch, how absolutely silent on the drive here? Hot, cold, hot, cold. And Ray shouldn’t be thinking about it now, he should be thinking about the case.

‘Great to see you looking so well,’ he says, and Stern smiles nastily at him.

‘Yeah? How’s the head, piggie?’

Pleasantries all dispensed with, the three of them sit and talk a while. Turns out, Stern’s been told very little in here; inattentive lawyer, good sign for the trial. From their perspective, anyway, not Stern’s. He knows about Marcus of course – that he’s dead, and that doesn’t look so good for him, either – but somehow, nobody’s told him about Laura.

‘What?’ he says, when they mention her being in custody.

Kowalski and Ray look at each other for a moment, unable to believe their good luck. ‘We took her in, what, two weeks ago?’ Kowalski says. ‘Boy was she angry.’

‘Yeah, that’s another thing you two have in common. Bad temper.’

‘But she’s innocent.’

‘Innocent?’ Kowalski laughs. ‘ _Her_? I don’t think so.’

Stern leans forward, desperate. It’s like somebody’s flipped a switch – suddenly all the meanness, all the front is gone. Poor guy, Ray thinks, he’s got it bad. Not that he should care. But still.

‘You’ve made a mistake,’ Stern spits. ‘You gotta let her go, let her _go_.’

‘She’s held on two murder charges,’ says Kowalski, shaking his head. ‘Very least, she’ll go up on one murder, one conspiracy to commit.’

‘But she wouldn’t do Marcus, why would she do that?’

‘He turned state’s evidence against you pretty quick, right?’

‘But that’s not… What’s the other charge for? Fryer?’ They nod. Stern looks half out of his mind. ‘She’s innocent, man. You’re making a big mistake.’

‘Yeah? How would you know?’ Ray leans forward too. ‘I mean, according to you, you were nothing to do with Fryer’s death. Maybe she did it instead of you. That _is_ still your defence, right?’

There’s a beat, both of them watching Stern and him looking right back, hands gripping the table tight as his eyes flick between them.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I did it. I did Fryer. But she was nothing to do with it, you’ve got to believe me.’

‘Stern—’

‘He took her out, he was always flirting with her, he was obsessed with her. He wouldn’t leave her alone. About a month ago he got her drunk and he… And when she told me, I flipped. Killed him. It was nothing to do with dealing, any of that, she didn’t know anything about it, it was just me. So now you can let her go.’

Kowalski’s voice is surprisingly soft when he says, ‘She has no alibi for the night Gordon Marcus was killed. She ran away from work, from her apartment, she was hiding out in—’

‘No,’ Stern interrupts. ‘You’re wrong about her.’

‘Is there somebody else we should speak to about Marcus?’

Stern thinks. He looks pretty desperate. ‘Aaron?’ he says after a second. ‘Aaron Jackson. Three of us came up together. Anything Marcus could’ve put on me would’ve dragged him in too. I’m telling you man, Laura’s _innocent_. I don’t care what happens to me. I don’t care. But she – she ain’t done nothing wrong, okay? Okay?’

They sit out in the car a while after they get out. Both of them quiet, thinking. Eventually Kowalski lets out a low whistle. ‘What a mess,’ he says.

Ray looks over at him. It’s so hot today, Kowalski’s hair’s sticking to his forehead, face thin and inscrutable. What a mess. Right.

He starts the car. The whole drive back to the station, neither of them say another word.

  


+

Later that afternoon, the heat’s somehow worse than ever, and Ray’s minding his own business, starting to think about heading home, when Kowalski comes over and sits at his desk. The spare chair’s still there, because where else is he gonna put it? Kowalski looks unsettled, nervous energy coming out of every limb.

‘I’ve put a couple of calls in and I think I know where we can find Aaron Jackson,’ he says. ‘There’s a gym he uses not far from where Marcus’s body was found. Apparently he’s there 8.30 to 9.30 most mornings.’

Ray pushes his papers aside, puts his elbows on the desk. ‘What do you think?’ he says after a moment. ‘Are we wrong about her?’

‘Laura Tate?’ Kowalski shakes his head. ‘No way. The way she ran when she saw it was us. Lying about knowing Fryer. She’s in it, she has to be.’

‘I’ve been wondering. Do you think he knows she’s the one who reported Fryer missing?’

‘Stern?’ Kowalski screws his face up in thought. ‘You mean do I think she sold him out?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘ _I_ don’t know.’

They laugh. The whole thing feels, for a moment, exhausting, inextricable. Ray covers his face with his hands. ‘It’s too hot to think.’

‘Yeah? What’s your excuse in the winter?’

He takes them away again, looks at Kowalski, who’s smiling a small, intimate smile. Ray laughs. ‘Have to wait and see, won’t you?’

Kowalski laughs too. Then something changes in his face, shutters, and that’s it, the iceman’s back. ‘Anyway,’ he says, unsmiling now, shifting his chair back, and Ray thinks, fuck’s _sake_.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Enough.’

Kowalski blinks at him. ‘What?’

‘I said enough,’ he says, standing up, tossing his keys in his pocket. ‘Come on.’

‘Where?’

‘We’re going back to my place to get drunk, okay?’

‘Vecchio—’

‘I said come on, stand up. No arguments. We gotta get – we gotta get—’ Normal again? ‘What I’m saying is, it’s professionally imperative that we do some bonding.’

Kowalski looks at him for a moment, thoughtful. Then he stands up, says, ‘Okay.’

He drives them back to Ray’s miserable flat, actually a little less miserable than it was because, these last weeks, he’s been chipping away at the boxes whenever he can be bothered. Ray throws the living room window open to let the air in, but it’s so still, it hardly makes a difference.

‘Beer or wine?’ he says, tossing the jacket he hasn’t needed all day over a chair.

Kowalski stands in the middle of the room, hand on the back of his neck. ‘Uh. Beer, I guess.’

‘Okay. Sit.’

Ray only has one two-seater couch, it seems weird to sit next to Kowalski and talk like that, all bunched up together, so he sits on a cushion on the floor, back to the wall with his legs sticking out in front of him. Both of them drink one beer and then another.

They stay on safe territory, talk about the Fryer case, going in the same old circles they’ve been round a hundred times now, which is pretty relaxing, as far as these things go. They agree a plan for the morning, Kowalski will pick Ray up from here at 8am to head to Aaron Jackson’s gym.

By the third beer, they’ve got off work and onto work-adjacent topics, people they know, Kowalski actually almost looking relaxed for the first time in what feels like a long time. This was a good idea. They don’t talk about Stella. Ray thinks about saying things are half off between them anyway, but it seems like bringing that whole thing up will do more harm than good.

When the sun’s gone down, it gets cooler, cool enough to eat.

‘Shall we get pizza?’ Kowalski asks, then goes a little red. ‘Obviously, I mean, I don’t have to stay for dinner.’

Ray all but rolls his eyes. ‘I’ll cook,’ he says.

Kowalski comes to the kitchenette with him, opens a bottle of wine. It’s nice, companionable, quiet in a good way. Ray makes orecchiette with broccoli and chilli, just throwing together stuff he’s got in the house, while Kowalski watches interestedly. ‘I didn’t know you cooked,’ he says.

Ray looks at him. ‘You call this cooking? It’s just like, three things in a pan.’

‘That’s cooking. It’s cold, you’re making it hot.’

‘Jesus, how do you keep yourself alive?’

‘I cook fine, did I say _I_ couldn’t cook?’

While he stirs the pasta, Ray has Kowalski cut a wedge of lemon, squeeze it into the frying pan, which Kowalski does with the air of a TV chef, making a meal of it, it’s kind of funny. Ray feels calmer. It’s good, normal.

After dinner, they sit on the couch with their feet up and the TV on in the background, some football game neither of them are really watching, but it’s good to have it there, a conversational lifeline, just in case. And maybe it’s the expansive feeling of relief, or maybe it’s the bottle of red they’ve finished, but for whatever reason, Ray finds himself saying, ‘Hey Kowalski.’

‘What?’

‘What went on with you and Fraser in Canada?’

Kowalski looks at him. He’s gone very still, big wide eyes, similar to how he looked when Ray said, _we’re seeing each other, me and Stella_. Like he’s been shot in the chest. For a second Ray thinks they’re gonna have another fucking row about it, imagines Kowalski picking him up by the shirtsleeves and shoving his head through the TV screen. Then Kowalski sighs, a long, exhausted release of breath.

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why are you asking now? I thought we had an agreement.’

‘An agreement?’

‘Are you gonna keep repeating everything I say? Yes Vecchio, an agreement, like an unspoken thing not to talk about it.’

Did they? Maybe. Oh well, all gone now. ‘Fraser called me last week and left a message, and it got me thinking.’

Kowalski screws up his eyes, folds his arms across his chest. ‘Uhuh. What about?’

‘Well – about whatever it is that went on.’

‘Who says anything went on?’

‘You’re exhausting, did you know that?’

Abruptly, Kowalski grins, toothy and surprising. ‘Pour me another drink,’ he says, and Ray does. They’ve moved on to the bottle of sherry Ma passed off on him last month for unclear reasons.

‘So are you gonna tell me or not?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Kowalski. He sips his drink. ‘It’s hard to explain.’

Ray thinks about saying: how hard can it be? Aren’t I you? But that’s the kind of joke he hasn’t made since before, since he fucked things up, losing, in the process, all Kowalski’s ease, his sense of humour, apparently even his violence. Ray wouldn’t have guessed it, but he’s missed all three. And maybe he could chance it, but it feels too far to push, all things considered, so he just says, ‘Try me.’

Kowalski shrugs. ‘He asked me to stay with him up there.’

‘He did what?’

‘Yeah. In Canada.’

Suddenly it’s, boom, rage and abandonment deep in Ray’s chest, like a bomb going off. It must be all over his face, he can’t help it. He thinks of Fraser, everything they did for each other, were to each other, his best friend – who hung around nearly two years after Ray went away, with a guy who had his name, and split as soon as the real Ray Vecchio got home.

And here Kowalski’s saying Fraser wanted _him_ to stay in Canada, best of friends, and Ray on the scrapheap down here. It’s the purest, most intense feeling of absolute betrayal he’s felt since his divorce, like Kowalski’s split his belly open, spilled his guts out on the floor.

‘But I didn’t want to,’ Kowalski says. His voice is quiet, looking away somewhere over Ray’s shoulder. Presumably at Canada.

‘Why not?’ Ray says, and it sounds so needy that he comes back to himself a little, embarrassed. It’s a _why not_ that clearly means, why wouldn’t you? Because he would have, wouldn’t he? If he’d been up there, and Fraser had asked. Sure, why not look at the snow for a little while, get out of this life, these four walls, this fucking job—

Kowalski’s watching him now, something strange and intense in his expression. His voice is quiet when he says, ‘I think I wanted something from him that he uh – couldn’t give me. So it would’ve been. Not a good idea.’ He shifts his weight, running a thumb across his jawline. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

Ray blinks at him. ‘No,’ he says, but it’s a question, not an answer.

‘Are you sure?’

Ray tries to laugh, like there’s some joke he isn’t getting, but Kowalski’s serious as a heart attack, and the laugh dies in Ray’s chest without even reaching his throat. He wants to say, _I’m sure, pretty sure_ , but the words won’t come out either. The way Kowalski’s looking at him. For a moment Ray thinks, is he gonna hit me again? His face is close to Ray’s own, and then: white noise, nothing, absolutely not one single thought inside his head for several seconds.

After that it’s an alarm bell, Ray’s ears full of his own heartbeat as he pulls away from Kowalski, who’s kissing him, and somehow he’s saying, ‘Woah woah woah woah,’ on auto-pilot with no idea the words were even coming out of his mouth.

‘Yep,’ says Kowalski, way too loud. He stands up, wobbles for a moment on his bad leg. ‘Yeah, don’t really know where I uh, anyway, you’re fucking my wife! Goodnight!’

And then he’s gone, the sound of the slamming door reverberating through Ray’s apartment, and Ray, head spinning, alone in his living room, says, to nobody, ‘Ex-wife.’

  


+

Ray’s got his hands in the lapels of Kowalski’s jacket, and they’re in the middle of a fight, and he’s furious. They’re at the back of the warehouse and it’s all gone wrong. There are bullets flying overhead and it’s all Kowalski’s fault, or maybe it’s his. Something hits the wall above their heads, splinters the brick, and Kowalski turns them both, pinning Ray in place, shaking him, _fuck’s sake Vecchio, fuck’s sake Vecchio_ , _you want to risk your own life, I don’t care, but not Stella’s_ , and Ray wants to protest, he’s never done a thing to put Stella in danger. Has he?

But he can’t talk because now Kowalski’s mouth is on his mouth, his hands on Ray’s chest, under his shirt, holding him there tight, tight, and then – pain in Ray’s chest – oh god –

Ray lies there for a moment, breathing hard, panic and something else, something far more frightening all caught up together. The darkened shapes of his bedroom resolve themselves into meaning. For a moment he thinks, thank god, just a dream. Then he remembers last night. His head’s pounding, and it’s outside his head too, the most awful sound, a loud, malevolent trilling, like some great evil bird.

Then he realises what it is. He answers the phone.

‘Hello?’

‘—may not even answer, you know.’

‘ _Hello_?’

‘Ray?’

‘Fraser?’

‘Good morning, Ray.’

And somehow it’s as good as gone, the dull-headedness of his hangover and low hum of panic, the tiredness, the dream, all of it. ‘Fraser,’ he says dumbly. ‘Is that really you?’

‘Why, certainly,’ and Ray can hear the smile in his voice. ‘Are you quite well?’

‘ _Quite well_? It’s the middle of the night, you woke me up.’

‘Isn’t it almost six a.m., your time?’

‘Exactly.’

There’s a pause. ‘Pardon me, Ray. It hadn’t occurred to me that you’d still be asleep.’

‘What, missing the best part of the day?’

‘Well, _yes_.’

Ray laughs. ‘Benny, how’d you even get this number?’

‘Oh, well you see, I called your mother.’

‘You called my mo—’

‘ _Initially_ ,’ Fraser interrupts, and insistent, sort of abashed, ‘initially, I called the station, left a message with Francesca. But when you didn’t phone back – well, I didn’t want to keep on bothering you at work—’

‘Fraser.’

‘And it occurred to me, Ray, that I left so soon after you came home – and that you might feel – well, that you might be—’

‘Upset.’

‘Angry with me. Yes, or that. I’m sorry it’s taken so long for me to call.’

‘That’s okay,’ says Ray, but he figures Fraser knows him well enough to hear the truth in his voice. Well he _has_ been upset. He has felt pretty abandoned, pretty, yes, _disposable_.

‘No, Ray, it’s not,’ says Fraser. He sounds sad. ‘I would hate for you to think that I’d – taken you for granted.’

‘Did you really think I’d be awake at this hour?’ Quiet on the line a moment. ‘Couldn’t sleep, huh?’

Fraser huffs a laugh. ‘My apologies. After you didn’t phone me back, I—’

‘You were worried.’

‘I—’

‘Well that’s good of you, Benny. I appreciate it. Anyway, who needs sleep, how _are_ you?’

The phone’s one of those big wireless things, like a suitcase, his brother-in-law’s crazy for cheap electronics, so Ray gets up and takes it through to the kitchenette. He puts the coffee machine on, opens the curtains to watch the dark sky getting lighter, and meanwhile Fraser talks about the delay in finding his new posting, the various intra-Canadian agreements that had to take place before anyone could decide where to send him, and how, in the meantime, he wound up tracking a hunter-turned-drug-smuggler across two hundred frozen square miles because, ‘Buck Frobisher – you do remember Buck Frobisher, Ray? – well he told me—’ And on it went, until eventually Fraser landed in the present day with, ‘And that’s why, I’m afraid, it took me so long to call.’

The story’s taken long enough that Ray and his coffee are back in bed. After a moment, he starts to laugh. It’s a good laugh, deep and fond and only a little sad, and Fraser joins in, perhaps a touch self-consciously. It’s probable, as Ray would struggle to explain it himself, that Fraser doesn’t understand just what’s so funny.

‘And what about you, Ray?’ Fraser asks, when they’ve calmed down.

‘Me? Oh, you know me, Benny, same old, same old.’

Same old, same old? Last night, after Kowalski left, he lay in his bed in the dark, still as a statue, thinking absolutely nothing, until it became clear that sleep would not be coming anytime soon. Then he got up, finished the sherry, crawled back to bed cross-eyed at something like two in the morning. He feels sick, looks insane, like he’s been scraped off the bottom of something.

For a moment he thinks, maybe it would help to talk about it? There’s certainly nobody else who he’d even know where to _start_. But the thought of it is – wrong. Like a betrayal somehow. Still, there is something.

‘Benny, can I ask you a question?’

‘Of course, Ray. Anything.’

‘What happened with you and Ray Kowalski?’

Quiet on the line. Fraser’s voice, when it comes again, is softer. ‘What do you mean, what happened?’

‘What do I mean? I mean I’ve got this big sad guy following round after me in a mood.’ And kissing me. ‘Getting drunk at work stuff.’ Trying to kiss me. ‘Acting like he’s, I don’t know—'

‘Like he’s what?’

For a moment, Ray thinks it’s sad, having to spell something out to Fraser when before, anytime it really mattered, they just understood each other. But then he realises that that’s not what’s happening here. Fraser wants him to say it, he wants to hear Ray say the word.

‘Heartbroken.’

Again, for a moment, quiet. Somebody in the street below beeping their horn. Chicago’s waking up.

‘Hmm,’ says Fraser, at length. ‘Well. That would explain some things that have been troubling me.’

‘Right,’ says Ray.

Because he knew, deep down, didn’t he? At some level, he’s known since – when? For weeks. Since the night Kowalski danced with every woman in that bar, like he had something to prove. The way he sat there after with the air let out of him. Ray may have been surprised last night but only because he hadn’t sat down properly and put two-and-two together, and anyway, most of that was about him. His own, whatever. Level of involvement. Something.

Ray realises he hasn’t said anything for a long time. Luckily, neither has Fraser. ‘Well you know I hate to think of you being troubled,’ he says in the end, trying for levity, but it just sounds sincere. And for a moment the white noise of Ray’s panic, his horror, clears enough for him to think: I kissed him back, didn’t I? I’m pretty sure that that’s what happened.

‘But does he seem all right?’ Fraser says at length. ‘Apart from that.’

‘Ah, there’s no _apart from_ , Benny, you know that as well as anybody.’

‘Right,’ murmurs Fraser, and Ray feels bad, immediately, for bringing her up, even though he hadn’t, not really.

‘But he will be. He’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. These things happen, don’t they?’

‘Certainly they do.’ A pause. ‘And you?’

‘Oh, my heart’s doing just fine,’ he lies, and Fraser laughs.

‘But you’re okay? Settling back in all right?’

‘Sure. Look, Benny, I gotta get ready for work – but thanks for calling, okay? And for calling Ma to get my number, you lunatic—'

Fraser laughs. ‘She was pleased to hear from me, actually. Mrs Vecchio’s always been so kind.’

‘Yeah, well, you know Ma, she’s always looking for another mouth to feed.’ Ray rubs a hand across his face, exhales. ‘Call again soon okay? Next time you can’t sleep, whatever, you know where I am.’

‘Okay. I will. Take care, Ray.’

‘You too Benny.’

Dial tone. Ray puts the phone back down, sits there a while longer, drinking his coffee, watching the sky turn from dark pink to pink-gray to blue-gray. Something’s different. He licks his lips, smacks his mouth. He’s made the coffee without sugar in it. Finished it, too. Didn’t even notice.

‘Huh,’ he says, to nobody.

  


+

Ray’s ready and waiting for Kowalski by 7.30. He’s two coffees, one breakfast and three aspirins in, and his brain’s starting to feel less like scrambled egg scraped off the underside of a dumpster. He even looks a little less dead, though still probably grayer in the face than you’d want to be.

Outside, the day is heating up again, it’s going to be another scorcher. Ray sits watching morning TV for half an hour, thinking maybe Kowalski won’t even come. The plan to swing by Aaron Jackson’s gym, after all, was made before –

And then his buzzer goes. Ray answers it, but no response. He looks out into the street. The GTO is there, right outside his building. ‘Okay then,’ he says to himself, pockets his wallet and keys, leaves the jacket, goes out to the car.

Kowalski’s sat behind the wheel looking as bad as Ray feels, maybe worse.

‘Morning,’ Ray says as he gets in.

Kowalski doesn’t start the car. ‘Look,’ he says, though it’s hard to say exactly what he’s looking at himself, staring fixedly through the windscreen at nothing. ‘Look. We’re never going to talk about it again, okay?’

With exhausted hysteria, Ray imagines himself saying, _About what! I’ve already forgotten!!_ , high-fiving Kowalski and cartwheeling out of the car.

So, fine, clearly they both feel ashamed. Kowalski presumably worried that Ray’s, whatever, a homophobe, or maybe just embarrassed because he got drunk and kissed somebody thinking of Fraser (oh God, like that isn’t crazy enough), and then _Ray_ , like a _shmuck_ , with whatever the hell’s been going on in his head lately, kissed him back.

Ray breathes out shakily and wonders what to say. Something articulate and brilliant that shows he’s understood about Kowalski and Fraser, or whatever, that he gets it – not that he _gets it_ , but that he understands – well, not that he understands, but that he doesn’t mind. It’s none of his business. Obviously what happened last night, what Kowalski did, it was a moment of madness, nothing real, nothing, even, to do with Ray at all, so why should he mind? He doesn’t, obviously, doesn’t care. But of course, not one single useful word comes to mind.

‘Okay,’ he says instead.

‘And I think, you know, let’s give it a few weeks. If things aren’t normal by the end of the month, if you feel… Then, fine. I’ll get a transfer, leave the country, whatever. But let’s give it a try.’

‘Look,’ says Ray, but Kowalski holds up a hand.

‘No,’ he says, not taking his eyes off the windscreen. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. It’s not always good to talk about stuff, you know that Vecchio? If you’d never told me about Stella then, honestly, I would’ve been happier, and _you_ would’ve been happier, and _she_ would’ve been happier, and way less people would’ve got shot.’

‘About Stella—'

‘ _No_.’ Now Kowalski looks around, wild-eyed. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? No talking. Sometimes people should just – bottle everything up. Especially the big stuff.’

‘Until they die?’

‘Until everyone’s dead.’

‘All right, fine. Let’s try that. Let’s just – take it to our graves.’

Ray holds out his hand and Kowalski takes it. They shake on it. Then he starts the car, and they go to work.

  


+

‘Well,’ says Doctor Barratt, sitting back in his chair. ‘Your mandatory psych assessment’s officially over. Thank you, Detective Vecchio, for your compliance these last few weeks.’

Ray says nothing, just sits, a little stunned, in his rolled-up sleeves. The heatwave’s broken at last but there are blue skies outside the window again. Somehow, these last few days, it’s slipped from an unseasonably warm late spring to being really, actually summer. It’s hard to believe how fast the year is going. And it will keep going, and then there’ll come a time, a year or so from now, when he’s been back as long as he was ever gone, and he’ll get further and further away from Langoustini for the rest of his life, and every day it will get easier.

‘I’m happy to confirm, for the record, that you’re doing as well as could be expected of anyone in your situation.’

‘Wow,’ says Ray. ‘That’s really, uh,’ depressing, he thinks. ‘Great. Thanks, doc. I appreciate it.’

The irony does not escape him, of course, that he’s being declared sane and functional just now, when he’s never felt crazier in his life. Because obviously the not-talking-about-it is sending him out of his mind.

At least the blowing hot and cold’s over and done with. Only now he’s got the shadow-Kowalski back, distant and strangely polite, like he was the day Ray told him about Stella, before the warehouse. Ray moves between feeling self-righteous about it – because Kowalski made this weird, why should he get punished for it? – and guilty. It’s obvious that the Stella thing’s still sitting there, Kowalski’s still angry, and now this too, this added weirdness, Ray knowing about him and Fraser, and Kowalski, furious, knowing that he knows.

And then, like it’s not strange enough, Kowalski being – whatever he is – not straight – and Ray’s weird dreams just getting worse. Every night since the one in his flat, with Kowalski, it’s been – anyway. He’s got half a mind to ask Doctor Barratt if it’s even possible to have a sexual crisis at his age, because is that what he’s having, is that what this is? Though of course, referring to it out loud would be enough to give him a panic attack, and after five weeks of being the best-behaved boy in Doctor Barratt’s temporary office, it seems a shame to get kicked off the force _now_ , for this.

There’s no point worrying about it, anyway, when clearly it’s all stress. He’s tired, under-slept, freaked out and lonely. He misses the easy companionship he had with Kowalski before he fucked things up, and he misses Fraser, and he left Stella the most insane message on her machine last night, ‘I’m sorry, you deserve better, I just can’t get into anything at the moment,’ blah blah blah. He didn’t mention Kowalski. Instead, like a real bum, he implied that it was about Vegas, that he was still too messed up to be in a relationship – which obviously is a lie, because he’s about to be declared fit for duty, literally right now. He is officially Fine.

Who knows, maybe this is all about Vegas, the whole stinking mess. He’s been crazy lately, hasn’t he? Those dreams, God, he should be committed. Anyway, somewhere in the middle of it all, the shine went off the thought of seeing Stella again, which is of course another sign that he’s insane, because objectively she’s amazing. And he wants to tell Kowalski that it’s over, in case it makes him forgive him, start talking to Ray like a person again, except that, obviously, they’re not allowed to talk about it.

So yeah. He’s going out of his fucking mind here, thanks.

‘Here you go,’ says Barratt, handing over his signed letter. ‘And congratulations, Detective Vecchio. I’m happy to declare you fit for duty.’

  


+

Kowalski’s been out all afternoon and come roaring back into the bullpen like a whirlwind, checking something, speaking to Welsh, to Frannie. Finally he sits down at Ray’s desk, wild-eyed, and says, ‘We’ve got him.’

Ray puts his pen aside, rubs his forehead. ‘Who?’

‘Aaron Jackson. Come on, get your stuff.’

There’d been no sign of him at the gym that morning, which was a shame, because the state they were both in, they could really have done with a win to get them through the rest of a day. Which was of course a nightmare. Sometimes when you get into the bullpen it’s like everyone knows you have a hangover, yelling and squawking at you like birds all day long, from the second you get in to the second you leave.

Anyway, Kowalski’s been digging since then; Ray knew he was, but left him to it. He’s been busy enough himself, tying up what happened at the warehouse, which it seemed best to leave Kowalski out of, at least as much as he could. But now Kowalski’s got something and clearly it’s good. Ray hasn’t seen him this worked up in days, weeks.

On the drive, headed out of town, Kowalski starts, ‘So when there’s no sign of Jackson that morning, I think my guy’s full of shit, right?’

‘Right.’

‘But I’m _wrong_. A little digging, gym records, and I find out, it’s not that Jackson doesn’t go there. It’s that he hasn’t been there since the night Gordon Marcus was killed.’

And Ray’s attention span is pretty shot lately, with everything, but boy does he sit up and take notice of that.

‘Oh you like that?’ Kowalski grins, elated. ‘Yeah. So did I. So my next question is, where’s he gone to ground? Because he’s not at his apartment, nobody’s been there for days by the looks of it, and after last time I made double sure, you know, fool me once and all that, so anyway, I check Tate’s place too, even Stern’s, not a sign. Okay so I think, needle in a haystack, change tack, right?’

‘Right,’ says Ray, just about keeping up, and trying not to mind that Kowalski’s digging has left him out so much.

‘So then I start looking into Stern’s business affairs, such as they are, find out what he’s left behind, you know? And I find out he was about to make it _big_. He’d made a contact players like him dream of, not just big league, I’m talking _super_ league. Shipment of heroin like you would not believe coming off a boat, huge, great price. Ask me when.’

Ray’s getting caught up in the energy of it now, excited, can’t help himself. ‘When?’

‘ _Tonight_ , Vecchio. Hey, you ever read _Treasure Island_?’

Ray blinks. ‘Uh. Maybe I saw the film, I don’t know. Why?’

‘The Muppets?’

Ray laughs. ‘The fifties one, asshole. _Why_?’

‘Because I got it all figured out.’ Kowalski thumps the wheel once, twice with the flat of his hand. ‘I was thinking about what you said before we went for Tate, king’s dead, long live the king, you remember?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘Vecchio. This whole thing was a _mutiny_.’

‘But Stern said—’

‘Yeah, I know, he confessed. He did it.’

‘Kowalski—’

‘Yes, he did, he did it, he killed Fryer. But _Tate_ put him up to it. She needled him about the guy for weeks, how he was after her, wouldn’t leave her alone, what did Peach say about Stern?’

‘Temper.’

‘Famous for it. And what did he say about Laura?’

‘Ruthless.’

‘Right. You know, I thought he was useless, Peach, but he was worth every fucking breakfast. Fryer was a red-herring, collateral, probably never put a foot wrong. Tate wanted to fit Stern up for him to get him out of the way. We’ve been on her hook this whole time. _She_ called the police, _she_ reported him missing, it’s her plan, her and Jackson’s together, to get Stern inside before this shipment came in. Before the big-time.’

‘How the hell do you know all this, her and Jackson?’

‘Because,’ and now Kowalski laughs, open-mouthed, ‘I went back and let Peach tell me the stupid Bonnie and Clyde story. _Jackson’s_ the one that introduced the two of them, Laura Tate and Stern. Her and Jackson, they’ve been the real Bonnie and Clyde the whole fucking time, right under our noses.’

‘And Marcus—’

‘Take your pick. My theory is, he knew more than he’d told us, so when he got out, he went to see Jackson – who was Stern’s oldest friend, right hand man, right, so the whole operation passes over to him – and asked to be cut in. Threatened to expose them to us. But he didn’t count on—’

‘Ruthless Tate.’

‘Exactly. Who puts a bullet in the back of his head while he’s talking to Jackson.’

‘And then they both separate, go to ground, gambling that even if we’re smart enough to pin it on one of them, we won’t make the connection.’

‘ _Exactly_.’

Ray shakes his head. ‘Jesus, you know I actually feel sorry for Stern? I mean, not really, he’s a murderer, but still, his friend and his girl, _ouch_.’ As soon as the words are out of his mouth, he could kick himself. Nothing on Kowalski’s face, at least not that you’d notice, but it’s like all the air’s been sucked out of the car. ‘Anyway,’ Ray says, blustering, desperate to change the subject, but nothing comes to mind.

Immediately the excited, energetic Kowalski’s gone. He nods, but says nothing, and they don’t talk again until they’ve pulled up, half an hour outside the city, by a deserted packing plant up on the water. ‘There it is,’ Kowalski says.

‘What’s the play?’

‘They’ll be here late tonight to get the shipment. So I thought, we go in now, stake the place out. Keep one eye on them, another the water. When the boat comes in, we arrest them.’

‘Shouldn’t we call vice?’

‘I got a radio from Frannie before we left, a portable. I’ll call it in as soon as we see the boat. Could’ve let some uniforms do it but I thought. You know.’

‘No, you’re right. It’s ours.’ Ray rubs a hand over his eyes, awkward. ‘Yours really. Well done. You’ve done—’

‘Don’t get all—’

‘No, it’s, I’m impressed. Seriously. You should be proud.’

Kowalski smiles. ‘Okay, lay off,’ he says, a little more warmly. ‘I’ll park up and then we should go in.’

They drive a way down the lake, take the radio out of the back of Kowalski’s car and walk the half hour back. They wait outside the building a while, watching from a safe distance. It’s dilapidated, but doesn’t look unsafe, looks like only a decade or so since it was abandoned. There’s no sign of any movement inside, of anyone being here at all, not yet; looks like Kowalski’s timed all this okay.

‘Right,’ he says.

They go inside, walk up to the second floor to wait there. It’s a huge, wide open space, must have been machines up here at one time, something like that. There’s big windows on one side with a view out over the water, and on the other side, smaller windows, a view down into the parking lot.

‘Perfect,’ Kowalski says, bouncing on the balls of his feet, and Ray smiles, shakes his head. It’s hard not to enjoy how into this Kowalski is, how excited. Well, fine, he deserves it.

Ray goes up and stands beside him at the big window, both of them looking out over the lake. It’s only 5pm, they’ve hours to wait, but the light on the water is nice and for once, it feels like this whole thing is going to go to plan. ‘Take a window each?’ he says, speaking quietly, not for any reason.

‘Great. Perfect.’

Then they hear it, the click of a gun from the dark on the other side of the room. They turn to look, just as a voice calls, ‘Slow movements only, you hear?’

A pause. Ray’s lungs are full of cold water. ‘We hear,’ he says.

‘Good. Hands where I can see them.’

Both of them raise their hands, slowly, as Aaron Jackson walks out of the dark with a gun pointed right at them. There’s two of them and one of him, but neither of them have a weapon out, so there’s no choice – they do as they’re told, wait as Jackson pats them down, holding the gun to each of their heads in turn as he does it.

He takes both their weapons, Kowalski’s radio, puts a bullet in it for good measure. The sound makes Ray flinch. He hopes nobody saw.

‘Just you two?’

Kowalski nods slowly, and Jackson grins. ‘Great,’ he says. ‘I know just where to put you.’

  


+

So at least they know where Aaron Jackson’s been staying since the hit on Marcus. This case has been such a nightmare, Ray would hate to still have questions about it when he dies. They saw the sleeping bag in the corner as Jackson marched them to an empty storage cupboard up on the third floor. Then he shut the door on them with an irritating little finger waggle, and locked them in.

That was at least five hours ago. Since then, very little’s happened, except the twenty minutes when Jackson decided to show his boys (or Stern’s, depending on how you view these things) what he had in storage. After they turned up for the drop, Jackson opened the door, unveiled Kowalski and Vecchio sat inside like the prize on a game show. Which they all seemed to think was very funny.

‘Shall we take the pigs out back and finish them off?’ asked one of the guys, but Jackson shook his head.

‘No point leaving DNA anywhere we don’t have to. When the boat comes, we’ll stick ‘em on that, wrap ‘em, pop ‘em. Get Silvera to drop ‘em way out in the middle of the lake.’

So now they wait. Ray sits on the floor, Kowalski across from him on the other side of the room, nursing a black eye, which he got for being a wiseass to one of Jackson’s friends. Locked in a small room with nine armed men outside, waiting for the right moment to kill them. No guns, no radio, no plan. And Ray just feels so unbelievably _exhausted_.

It’s been maybe forty-five minutes since they last spoke, but he can’t take it anymore. ‘Look,’ Ray says, voice hoarse with disuse. ‘We’re gonna die.’

Kowalski’s head snaps up immediately. ‘Vecchio,’ he says warningly.

‘I’m serious, okay? Let’s just – have a fight about it, like normal people, get it over with.’ He stands up, trying to get some adrenalin flowing, or at least get rid of the pins and needles. ‘Then we can, you know, die happy, or cordial, anyway.’

Kowalski, still sat on the floor, looks up at him, tiredly. ‘I’m—’

‘No, listen to me, okay? I’ve broken things off with Stella. So you don’t have to be angry with me anymore. It was a temporary madness.’

Kowalski covers his face with his hands. ‘I’m not angry with you, you’re angry with me,’ he says in a flat, tired voice.

This is like trying to start a fight with a wall, but here goes nothing, because that’s bullshit, and Ray tells him so. ‘ _Bullshit_ ,’ he spits, louder than he meant to. ‘ _You’re_ angry with _me_.’

‘Vecchio, you’re crazy, you’ve been angry with me ever since I…' But Kowalski trails off, won’t say the words.

Ray tries the handle one more time, just in case. Obviously the door’s still locked. No vent, no airflow, no window. No radio. No bullets. Nine guys outside. What would Fraser do? He wouldn’t be in here in the first place. They’re going to die, so fuck it, fuck it all. ‘Look, I’m not angry about that, I don’t care—’

‘You—'

‘Don’t look at me that way, I’m not even breaking the rules because, you know, this is the tiny little room we’re gonna die in, so—'

‘Okay,’ Kowalski says, climbing to his feet with an air of tired surrender. ‘But shouldn’t we be working on how to get _out_? Not wasting time on—'

‘We did all that hours ago, Kowalski, there’s _nothing_.’ Ray shakes his head. ‘I’m not angry with you. I can’t believe you think I’d be so – so – whatever it is you think about me.’

‘Vecchio.’

And then there’s a sound outside, a big sound. Yelling. Is that the shipment coming or what? How many voices is that? They both go to the door, stand with their ears pressed up against it, breathing hard, straining to hear. Like this, their faces are inches apart. ‘Hey, you want to keep fighting or what?’ Kowalski whispers.

‘Sshh.’

‘You’re right you know, this might be our last chance before we get murdered on a heroin boat.’

There’s a surge of feeling in Ray’s stomach, fear and desperation and something altogether weirder, a strange, dark wanting. ‘ _Kowalski_ ,’ he says, exasperated.

Kowalski’s pupils are blown. He looks on the verge of laughing, which maybe is a normal response to being about to killed, maybe not. Could be they’ve both gone a little nuts.

Then there’s a voice on the other side of the door. ‘Hello?’

Ray sees Kowalski’s jaw drop, actually drop, like in the movies. ‘ _Welsh_?’

‘Kowalski? Are you both in there? Are you okay?’

Ray – who’d been, for a moment, too shocked to speak – manages a hoarse, ‘Yes.’

‘Hey, good evening,’ Welsh calls back. ‘We’ve seen what happened to your radio. Guess that explains why you never called in. You wanna stand back a sec, so we can get you out of there?’

  


+

The whole drive back to town, they don’t talk, don’t say a word, Ray’s body still thrumming with adrenalin and the ghost of fear. Kowalski drives them to his place, no conversation about it. He stops the car outside his building and they both get out, unspeaking, and go upstairs. Inside, he pours them both a whiskey.

They sit on the sofa, not looking at each other, not moving. ‘Close one, huh,’ Kowalski says eventually, voice quiet and stunned.

Ray looks over at him and says nothing. He can’t believe that after all that, a day like that, he’s expected to have an actual conversation, let alone one with Kowalski, with such strange currents under the surface. It feels like having to do a crossword with a blindfold on. But of course, being alone would be worse.

Ray puts his arms over his face and sits there, breathing. Then he takes his arms away again because he can feel Kowalski watching him. Strange expression.

‘So,’ Kowalski says slowly. ‘So you and Stella. That’s all done?’

‘Yes,’ Ray says, speaking quietly, he’s not sure why. ‘Does that mean you can forgive me now?’

‘I told you, I’m not angry.’

Ray barks a short, tired laugh. ‘You’re a bad liar,’ he says.

‘I _was_ angry. I can say that. Not now. What about you?’

‘I already said I’m not, I never was. I mean, I get it, you and Fraser, you – you know – I get it. The other night, what happened, it wasn’t about me. I was just – in the way. Why should I mind?’

Kowalski narrows his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What do I mean, what?’ asks Ray, exhausted into complete linguistic collapse.

‘What do you mean it wasn’t about you?’

‘I mean it wasn’t a real kiss.’

‘ _That’s_ what you thought?’ Kowalski says, shaking his head. Stupid black eye, hair sticking to his forehead, he looks certifiable. Probably they both do. Ray opens his mouth to say something else but he can’t, because it’s coming now, he knows it, and he feels so sick and desperate and terribly, terribly alive.

‘Vecchio, you know, I could kill you. I’m not joking. I could murder you.’ Then Kowalski leans forward and closes the gap between them.

It’s a soft, tired kiss, infuriatingly gentle, not at all the way it’s been in Ray’s dreams, but he makes a small, desperate noise in his throat anyway. Kowalski tilts his head, pushes his tongue into Ray’s mouth. _I’ve gone mad_ , he thinks, one bright dizzying moment, and then it changes. Kowalski lifts himself up, settles in Ray’s lap with his knees either side of Ray’s thighs, bearing down on him. Suddenly the kiss is different, both of them breathing hard, teeth clashing, and Kowalski’s hands are on his chest, pushing, pushing down even when there’s nowhere for either of them to go.

The last of Ray’s fear goes out suddenly as a flame. The future no longer exists, all he can think of is the present, that he needs more, now, this minute. Kowalski’s muttering something in his ear and it sounds like an insult, but who cares. Ray pushes Kowalski’s t-shirt up and off, bites him hard on the shoulder. Palm of his hand on Ray’s jeans and then Kowalski has Ray’s shirt off too, the room smelling of old fear and spilled whisky, he must have knocked the glass over, and he makes a choking noise as Ray bites him again where his neck and shoulder meet.

Ray’s never known it like this before, fear and excitement all mixed up together, and the little edge to it of anger, like this is the end of a fight they’ve been having for weeks, which maybe it is. Kowalski kisses the same way he does everything, contrarily, but it’s strangely compelling. Ray ends up pushed onto his back, flat on the sofa, Kowalski lying on top of him with a hand inside Ray’s jeans, still muttering, ‘Fuck’s sake, Vecchio, Jesus,’ and that’s how it is until both of them come, desperate, furious, still wearing most of their clothes.

They lie there for a little while, Kowalski’s head resting in the crook of Ray’s neck. Then he says, ‘Fuck,’ and starts laughing.

Ray isn’t sure whether to feel insulted. ‘Oh, this is funny to you?’ he says defensively.

Kowalski shoves him and sits up, grinning. Now Ray can see Kowalski’s face, he relaxes a bit, though his sense of the future as a big animal that wants to eat him is definitely on its way back. ‘You’ll laugh too when I tell you,’ Kowalski says. Then he picks his shirt up off the floor, cleans them both up with surprising seriousness, Ray watches the grin die on his face as he does it.

‘What?’

Kowalski looks at him with his brow furrowed. ‘It’s just, is, uh – was that okay?’

‘Sure,’ says Ray, who feels in some ways worse, in others better than he has in years. He’s not sure how convincing he sounds. But it is okay, he thinks. Anyway, it will be.

‘I don’t mean like sexually was that okay, I don’t mean like _was that good_ ,’ Kowalski says, exasperated. ‘I mean, is it okay that we did that? Are you okay?’

‘I know what you meant,’ Ray says, laughing. Kowalski’s right, all this, it is kind of funny. Then he finds the laughing won’t stop, covers his face with his hand, keeps going until Kowalski leans down and kisses him again, with a tenderness and intensity that is surprising. There’s a needy, jealous part of Ray that wants to say, what about Fraser? Wants to ask when it became about him, wants to know. But thinking about Fraser too much in all this is – confusing. Maybe Kowalski’s right about the talking. Maybe it’s not always good, or at least, it can wait.

Kowalski pulls back. ‘Hey, know why I was laughing?’

‘Nope.’

‘I was thinking, imagine trying to explain this, any of it, to anyone.’

‘We’d sound insane.’

‘Right?’

‘Poor Stella, I can’t ever—’

‘Oh _God_ ,’ says Kowalski, with feeling. He lies squeezed up against Ray, on his side, with an arm flung over his face. He seems to be moving between genuine distress and hysteria. At least his sense of humour’s back. And he has this huge, wide smile Ray’s never seen before, not properly at least. It makes him look younger. But when he moves his arm away, the black eye’s still there. Somehow it feels like it shouldn’t be.

Ray reaches out, puts his palm on Kowalski’s face. ‘Poor eye,’ he says stupidly. He’s always found it hard to be articulate within twenty minutes of an orgasm.

‘Oh, you should see the other guy,’ Kowalski murmurs. They smile at each other. Then he lifts his head, bites the pad of Ray’s thumb, takes it into his mouth. Ray feels, briefly, light-headed. If this is a mid-life crisis, he’ll take it.

Things progress. Kowalski’s mouth is on his jaw, his neck, his collarbone; fingernails on Ray’s chest, and then he shifts lower, takes Ray’s slowly hardening dick into his mouth.

‘ _Fuck_ , Kowalski,’ Ray says, in a voice he barely recognises, like the words have been dragged out of his bones.

Annoyingly, that makes Kowalski stop. He looks up at Ray with that stupid grin of his and says, ‘You’re really gonna call me that in bed? My surname? Like a fucking army sergeant?’

‘That’s your _name_ ,’ Ray says, indignant. ‘What are we gonna do otherwise, go around calling each other _Ray_? Like twins?’

‘Twins don’t have the same first name, asshole.’

Now they’re laughing again. ‘This is insane,’ Ray manages.

‘Oh yeah, we’re doomed. You know that, right? Doomed.’

Instead of answering, Ray drags Kowalski up and kisses him again. He keeps his quiet disagreement to himself.

  


+

In the end, the cases are so wound up together that Stern and Tate and Jackson are tried all together. It would be fair to say that there is tension in the courtroom. The trial takes place just after Labor Day, hot day at the end of a hot summer, and the two of them, Vecchio and Kowalski, go down in their suits to give their statements.

As trials go, it’s entertaining, almost. Stern gets twenty years, the other two thirty apiece, their crimes being so much more pre-meditated. Tate’s mother, wearing a nice hat, cries in the stand, as though things like this aren’t supposed to happen to people like them. It’s a dismal little emotion, but still, Ray allows himself to feel it for a moment and only a moment: _ha ha_.

‘Detective Vecchio?’ Ray sees Mitch Fryer’s parents on the steps outside the court, calling them over. He feels Kowalski’s hand on his back, for a moment, holding him in place – a quick, gentle pressure, too fast for anyone to notice except him. But he notices.

Ray can hardly believe they’re the same people. They look sad, exhausted, though still better than last time he saw them, because they’re relieved. It’s a relief that makes them look younger, safer in the world, because this is what they do, on good days, him and Kowalski: they let people believe that the systems can work, can protect them. And sometimes they can.

Mrs Fryer dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief, and her husband can’t stop shaking both their hands, him and Kowalski, thanking them over and over. Their son’s still dead. But it’s something, isn’t it? It’s something.

**Author's Note:**

> This is by some way the longest fic I've ever written - thank you so much for reading it.
> 
> If you liked this story, you can also reblog it [on Tumblr](https://the-omnishambles.tumblr.com/post/639313436026732544/the-other-due-south-archive-of-our-own).


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